Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

My psychokinesia—PK—means I can feel every object around me: its texture, its weight, its relation to other objects. It’s a constant flood of stimuli. When I was little, Mom and Dad made me run through exercises, getting me to really focus in on a single object at a time—a glass, a toy car, a pencil. They made me move them around, describe them in excruciating detail. It took a long time, but I managed to deal with it. Now I can sense the objects around me in the same way you sense the clothes you’re wearing. You know they’re there, you’re aware of them, but you don’t think about them.

If I focus on an object, like the lock—the wires, the latch assembly, the emergency battery, the individual screws on the latch and strike panels—it’s as if I send out a part of myself to wrap around it, like you’d wrap your hand around a glass. And then, if I’m locked on, I can move it. I don’t have to jerk my head or hold out my hand or screw up my face like in the movies, either. I tried it once, for fun, and felt like an idiot.

It takes me about three seconds to find the latch and slide it back. The mechanism won’t move unless it receives the correct signal from the fingerprint reader—or unless someone reaches inside and moves it with her mind. It’s actually a pretty solid security system. I’ve definitely seen worse. But whoever built it obviously didn’t take into account the existence of a psychokinetic, so I guess he’s totally fired now.

“And we’re good.” I hop to my feet, using my PK to pull the handle down. I haven’t even touched the door.

“Hm.” Annie tilts her head. “Nice work.”

“Was that a compliment? Annie, are you dying? Has the cancer spread to your brain?”

“Let’s just get this over with.”

We’re on this operation because of a clothing tycoon named Steven Chase. He runs a chain of high-end sportswear stores called Ultra, which just means they’re Foot Locker stores without the referee jerseys. If that was all he was doing, he’d never have appeared on China Shop’s radar, but it appears Mr. Chase has been a very naughty boy.

Tanner got a tip that he was embezzling money from his company. Again, not something we’d normally give a shit about, but he’s not exactly using it to buy a third Ferrari. He’s funnelling it to some very shady people in the Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, which is when government types like Tanner start to get mighty twitchy.

Now, the U.S. government could get a wiretap to confirm the tip. But even if you go through a secret court, there’ll be some kind of paper trail. Better a discreet call gets made to the offices of a certain moving company in Los Angeles, who can look into the matter without anything being written down.

And before you start telling me I’m on the wrong side, that I’m doing the work of the government, who are the real bad guys here, and violating a dozen laws and generally being a pawn of the state, just know that I’ve seen evidence of what people like Chase do. I have no problem messing with their shit.

We’re not actually going anywhere near Steven Chase’s office. Reggie could hack his computer directly, but it would require a brute-force attack or getting him to click on a link in an email. People don’t do that any more, unless you promise fulfilment of their very specific sexual fantasies. The research on that is more trouble than it’s worth, and you’ll have nightmares for months.

Chase is in town tonight. He flew in for a dinner or an awards show or whatever rich people do for fun, and it’s his habit to come back to the office afterwards. He should be there now, up on the 30th floor. He’ll work until two or three, catch a couple hours of sleep, then grab a red-eye back to New York. Which works just fine for us.

If you can access the fibre network itself—which you can do in the server room, obviously—you can clamp a special coupler right on to the cable and just siphon off the data as it passes by. Of course, actually doing this is messy and complicated and requires a lot of elements to line up just right… unless you have me.

The cables from every floor in the building run down to this room. The plan is to identify Chase’s cable, attach a coupler to it, then read all the traffic while sipping mai tais on our back porch. Or in my case scarfing Thai food and drinking many, many beers in my tiny apartment, but whatever.

Chase might encrypt his email, of course, but encryption targets the body of the email, not the sender or subject line. If he emails anyone in the Ukraine or Saudi, we’ll know about it. It’ll be enough for Tanner to send in the big guns.

The server room is even more dimly lit than the corridor. The server banks stand like monoliths in an old tomb, giving off a subsonic hum that rumbles under the frigid air conditioning. Annie tilts her chin up even further, as if sniffing the air. She points to one side of the door. “Wait there.”

“Yes, sir, O mighty boss lady.”

She ignores me, eyes scanning the server stacks. I don’t really know how she’s going to find the correct one—that was the part of the planning session where they lost me. All I know is that when she does, she’s going to trace it back to where it vanishes into the floor or wall. We’ll open up a panel, and I’ll use my PK to float the coupler inside, attaching it to the cable. It can siphon data, away from the eyes of the building’s technicians, who would almost certainly recognise it on sight.

As Annie steps behind one of the servers, I slip my earbud back in. May as well listen to some music while—

“Shit,” Annie says.

It’s a quiet curse, but I catch it just fine. I make my way over to find her staring at a clusterfuck of tangled cables spilling out of one of the servers. The floor is a scattered mess of tools and loose connections. A half-eaten sandwich, dribbling a slice of tomato, sits propped on a closed laptop.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” I ask.

Annie ignores me. “Paul, we’ve got a problem. Over.”

“What is it? Over.”

“Techs have been in. It wasn’t like this this morning; Jerian would have told me.”

Jerian—one of Annie’s Army. Her anonymous network of janitors, cleaners, cashiers, security guards, drug dealers, nail artists, Uber drivers, cooks, receptionists and IT guys. Annie Cruz may not appreciate good hip-hop, but she has a very deep network of connects stretching all the way across LA.

“Copy, Annie. Can you still attach the coupler? Over.”

Annie frowns at the mess of cables. “Yeah. But it’ll take a while. Over.”

Joy .

“Understood,” Paul says. “But we can only run interference for so long on our end. You’d better move. Over.”

Annie scowls, crouching down to look at the cables. She takes one between thumb and forefinger, like it’s something nasty she has to dispose of. Then she stands up, marching back towards the server-room doors.

“Um. Hi? Annie?” I jog after her, earbud bouncing against my shoulder. “Cables are back there.”

“Change of plan.” She keys her earpiece. “Paul? Tell Reggie to switch over the cameras on the 30th floor. Over”

“Say again? Over.”

“We’re going up.”

I don’t catch Paul’s response. Instead, I sprint to catch up with Annie, getting to her just she pushes through the doors. “Are you gonna tell me why we’ve suddenly abandoned the plan, or—”

“We can’t hide the coupler if they got people poking around the cables.” She reaches the elevator, thumbing the up button. “We need to go to the source.”

“I thought the whole point was not to go near this guy. Aren’t we supposed to be super-secret and stealthy and shit?”

“We’re not going to his office, genius. We’re going to the fibre hub on his floor.”