Mel Odom - Preying for keeps

Skater watched her as she worked. The tension was still with her, and her face was paler than usual. He felt guilty that she'd come almost in spite of herself and was having to face old fears she'd obviously left in the Tir. But the guilt wasn't professional and it wasn't going to do anyone a fragging bit of good, so he shelved it.

"They're going to explode," Duran said. "Probably won't be any pieces big enough to identify."

Archangel powered up her deck and started tapping at the keys. "But if there are, the Border Patrol's going to be suspicious about why two thrill-gangers suddenly went into the arms business. FitzWallace is no babe in the woods."

Skater knew the name from his scan on Portland. Colonel Jacob FitzWallace was the head of the Border Patrol. And Archangel was right; the guy was savvy. "Did you get a SIN on either of them?" she asked.

"There wasn't exactly time."

Archangel dug through her backpack and pulled out a surface scanner/reader. She carried it for times the team needed to check fingerprints or steal them for future reference. She passed it back to Trey. "Get me their prints."

"They're dead." Trey didn't look at all happy about the assignment.

Archangel gave him a hard look. "Chummer, we're hours behind on the setup for this run. Part of it's my fault, but I can't play catch-up if you're dragging your hoop."

"Right." The mage made his way to the back, pulling a handkerchief from a shirt pocket.

"I can loop into the harbor patrol's crime files and set up records and SINs for both these guys. It's a lot easier than trying to crack Lone Star's systems. If FitzWallace asks Lone Star to do a background check on those bodies, the Star will do a search of all its precincts, triggering a general info dump from all the law-enforcement agencies in the area. The files I set up will feed right into Lone Star's resources and they'll accept them as good. All we have to do is make sure the Halloweener SINs turn up for the Border Patrol to find."

"But don't you need to get into the Matrix to do all that?" Skater asked.

"If we had a satellite uplink, there'd be no prob. But we don't, so I'll just create the files, compress them for a faster delivery, and tag a friend who's got access to a satlink through a black BBS. I can manage all that very nicely over this portaphone." Archangel looked up. "Buying time on the satlink's going to be expensive, but it's worth it." She hooked the telecom up to her deck as Skater watched.

The amphibian's registration could be altered," Skater said.

"Who's it registered to now?" Archangel asked.

"A joker named Kennedy who's been dead for seventeen months." Wheeler replied. "Skater and I met him during a run that fell through. He was a hawker for a line of antiques and elf talismans coming out of some of the best little backdoor art factories you'd ever want to see. But none of them had ever seen the Old Country, whichever Old Country he was referring to at the time. He was a fragging artist. Had to be to support the gambling jones he had.

"The last time we went to see him, someone got to him before we did. Put a couple fletchettes through his wetware and left him at an outside table at the Renton Hole in the Wall. Nobody saw anything or even knew he was dead. We didn't know it either till we walked up on him. We'd already been noticed, so we had a drink each, then grabbed Kennedy and got the hell out of there. We arranged for the body to disappear, then when the time came to register the amphibian, we used his name."

Archangel nodded. "I can show that he sold our gangers the plane yesterday, log it in through licensing. Their SINs will pop up and should leave us clear. For awhile. When someone looks really close, those SINs are going to crumble and fall away."

Trey returned and handed the scanner over. Archangel jacked it into her deck and downloaded the images.

"How do you plan to get into NuGene?" she asked as she worked.

Skater shifted in his seat. "It's going to be tough. The place is maxxed out on security right now." Kestrel had turned up quite a bit of information on the current situation. "At least the perimeter stations are. Knight Errant is handling the account. But they're not being let inside. NuGene is taking care of its own internal security."

"Meaning Ellard Dragonftetcher."

"Yeah. The only option we've got is kidnapping one of NuGene's researchers and using him or her to get through the outer defenses."

"That's risky."

"Depends on how much the person we get wants to live," Duran said, "I'm pretty good at convincing someone their life is on the line."

"I've got another idea. When Torin Silverstaff was first building up the company, he constructed as cheaply as possible." Archangel tapped a key and transferred an image to the plane's large vidscreen so the team could see. A datapic of the NuGene building formed, all hard lines and angles. "He knocked down pre-existing buildings, scraped the rubble out of the way, and built on top of them. But he had to use the existing foundations and utility hookups."

The building image became translucent and remained sitting at the side of the street. Below it, a schematic of the foundation formed with grids in red lines and in yellow.

"The red lines are the current architecture," Archangel said, "and the yellow is where the previous buildings were." Skater studied the schematic. "They've put up some false walls and floors."

Archangel tapped more keys. "The construction crews who rebuilt NuGene weren't able to completely incorporate the pre-existing foundations. They had to sink some new support columns."

"But there may be some pockets inside the foundation that aren't covered by Knight Errant or the internal sec-systems." Skater peered at the gridded sections of the building's two foundations, excitement flaring to life inside him. Using one of the R amp;D people as a means of getting into the building hadn't been his preference, but it had seemed executable. "If we can get into those lower levels-"

"We might be able to tap the computer lines without them ever knowing we were there," Archangel said. "Next best thing to a zipless frag," Duran said. "They could have filled in the holes," Skater said, playing the devil's advocate.

Archangel shook her head. "I went over the blueprints I raided from the Portland City Commissioner's Office. Putting that much concrete in the ground near the river for a purely cosmetic reason would have cost serious nuyen in environmental taxes."

"The elves were already pushing for a back-to-nature movement then." Duran commented. "I guess they worry about other contaminants corps might want to hide in something built along the lines of a tomb."

"With good reason," Trey said. "Toxic waste is expensive to get rid of through legitimate means."

"There were letters from Silverstaff requesting that the Commissioner's office waive the tax," Archangel said, "but they turned him down. Silverstaff didn't invest the capital because the pouring was expensive as well."

"Is there a way to get to the foundation?" Skater asked.

“The city's been honeycombed with drainage systems to help prevent flooding." Archangel hit more keys and more lines took shape on the screen. "I found two likely prospects. Both of them come in from the river."

On the screen, the NuGene building reduced in size as the rest of the city came into view around it. An eyeblink later, two green tubes raced in from different positions along the curvature of the Willamette River, coming together at a juncture almost at NuGene's doorstep.

"From here," Archangel said, "we should be able to cut through the drainage tunnel into one of those pockets under the building. The other tunnel I found here"-a yellow tube formed on the screen almost touching the green joint and extended under NuGene-"has been abandoned."