Watch Dogs: Dark Clouds

CHAPTER FIVE

Roger Verrick was playing videogames that killed things for real.

He loved that idea.

He was in a sprawling, well protected rural house, about a hundred miles southwest of Chicago. But it wasn’t an old house—it was the latest in Smart Houses, a home-automation prototype owned by Blume and sometimes used by Blume executives. Verrick was just out there for the weekend, to mix work and play—and to throw his enemies off, if they were setting up an attack on him in town.

The “hunting exercise”, as he called it, was in a comfortable basement, what used to be called a rumpus room, with carpets on the floor, sofas, a refrigerator full of beer—and a wide desk with several monitors set up. Verrick was sitting at the desk, operating the system through a simple mouse, like a PC videogame. Only it wasn’t a videogame really—it was a set up for controlling a hunting drone.

The hunting drone was illegal, of course. That was part of the fun. Since the laws were enforced by an Order that Verrick despised, he enjoyed breaking them when he could get away with it. He needed the recreation right now, too. It took his mind off Wolfe—and that ache in his lower spine. Verrick managed not to think about taking the pills when he was hunting—at least, hunting in this comfy way. He had made up his mind to cut back on the Oxycodone. Had to focus on getting all the pieces in places, all the dominoes that would fall over in a long row, triggering the Iceberg Project…

Standing behind Verrick, humming annoyingly to himself and rocking on his heels, was the project’s chief technician, Geoff Starling, a former Unmanned Aerial Vehicle designer for the USAF. Post Air Force, Geoff Starling was getting flabby and sloppy. He almost always wore the same one-piece AF mechanic’s coveralls. And Starling didn’t bathe enough. Verrick could smell him.

“Starling,” Verrick said, guiding the drone not far over the treetops of the woods near the farm, “do step back from me, won’t you please? At least a yard back.”

“Sir, certainly, yes sir,” said Starling, in that obsessive-compulsive way he had. He washed his hands every thirty minutes but rarely washed his clothing or his person.

Starling stepped back, and Verrick focused on slowing the drone till the delta-shaped aluminum and fiberglass UAV was almost hovering over the slightly snow-flecked grove of black walnut and sycamore trees. Of course, he couldn’t see the drone directly—he saw an outline of it generated by the program. But his point of view was actually angled down on the treetops from the camera in the base of the drone. “Thought I saw something move down there, between the trees,” he muttered.

Verrick slowly slid the wheel on the mouse forward, inching the UAV over a small clearing. There was a little meadow about a hundred feet below. And in entering the meadow, taking delicate steps, moved a deer—a doe, with its mulish ears up and twitching. Perhaps the doe was hearing the distant whirr of the drone and not recognizing the sound. It took a few more steps, looking back and forth, picking its way through dimpled patches of snow…

“There she is, sir, yes sir,” Starling said, looking at the screen from behind Verrick.

“Starling—keep quiet, I’ve got to concentrate.”

“Sir, yes sir.”

Verrick moved the drone a little more ahead, then right clicked to bring up the drone action menu. He clicked on reduce altitude, and the ground seemed to slowly zoom toward the camera…

Then the deer looked right up at him, her large brown eyes startled. She poised to leap away…

With a flick of his hand he selected the aim cursor, swung the crosshairs to the deer, and clicked on fire.

Somewhere, about a half mile from here, the drone—in actual fact—fired a rifle round from the tube on its base. The UAV jiggled in the air with the recoil, but not too much, most of the recoil being redistributed by hydraulic pressure release devices.

The deer was halfway through a leap—and was struck in the rear right leg. It stumbled, fell, then was up again, limping…

“Ha haaaaa,” Verrick said. “I got it!”

“Sir, yes sir!” Starling agreed eagerly.

Verrick tracked the deer a little farther as it staggered along, centered the crosshairs on its back, and fired again—right through its spine. The deer went down, twitching.

The deer probably wasn’t dead yet. There were only four rounds in the magazine. He decided to save the other two, in case he could find something else to kill.

“Sir, want me to arrange for that deer to be picked up for food, sir?” asked Starling. He had a taste for venison.

“No, don’t bother. Is that a rabbit, over there?”

Verrick tracked the UAV over to the other side of the meadow, thinking that the next step would be to get someone human out there to hunt; someone he needed to eliminate anyway. Like, for example, Aiden Pearce. Or a certain former Delta Force sergeant…

Mick Wolfe. How would it be to have Mick Wolfe running like a rabbit through the woods under an armed UAV? Ironic and appropriate. Because Wolfe had used another drone to spy on Verrick’s own special acquisitions operation. Wolfe had nearly stopped that money from getting to Verrick—and to Purity.

Sadly, it would be taking too much of a chance to put Wolfe out in those woods to let him run free so he could be hunted down like an animal. There was always a chance Wolfe could get away in a scenario like that.

Verrick wasn’t going to take that chance. He was going to make sure Wolfe died at the first chance that came along…

Wolfe couldn’t be allowed to interfere with the Iceberg project, nor could Pearce. They were pushy, inquisitive, threatening. They might find out about it, if they were persistent and lucky. And if people involved in the project didn’t keep their damned mouths shut.

Verrick spun in his desk chair, to aim a sudden glare at Starling. “You remembering what we talked about, with respect to Iceberg, Starling? High level discretion?”

“Sir, yes sir, I do remember,” Starling said hastily, rubbing his hands together in washing motions.

“Just see that we get all those drones ready when we need them.”

“Sir, you sure you don’t want them weaponized, sir?”

“Yeah. I’m sure. They’re not the weapons. Just make sure they’ll do what they’re supposed to. Or you’ll be running through those woods out there, under one of your own drones, instead of some dumb animal…”

Eight P.M., and Mick Wolfe trudged along a snowy street on the Southside of Chicago, just a few blocks from Washington Park. Cars had made dark, slushy ruts down the middle of the street, past a boarded over restaurant and a liquor store; a truck hissed along through the slush, then turned the corner.

It wasn’t thick snow; the snowfall had been sparse. Thinking like a Delta Force operative, Wolfe wondered if snow was to his advantage, or disadvantage, in the coming conflict on this terrain. Probably the latter—anything that slowed him down would increase his risk, if he were being hunted. And he knew he’d be hunted.

He did have one advantage, if Aiden Pearce could be believed. Pearce had gotten back in touch; his face, this time, appearing on the PC where Wolfe had been sitting.

“You’ll find something that looks like a television remote control, in the top drawer of that desk,” Pearce had said. “That’s a security cam scrambler. Take it with you, and anytime you’re crossing a street it’ll blot out the cameras on the block you’re coming to. It’s designed to look like a glitch in the system.”

“Take it with me where?”

“You’re going out to a Tech Shack store! I can see the PC is running slow for your program—you’re going to need an external drive to speed things up. I can’t arrange for it to be brought to you, right now. Too risky. You can simply buy one at the Tech Shack—ten blocks north. I recommend you walk there. Don’t trust the cabs, not till you hear differently. You’ll see someone you’ve met once before on the way—Blank. He may have a message for you.”

“But Pearce—”

But then Pearce’s image had vanished.

And now Wolfe was trudging back from the store with his small backpack over one shoulder; the external drive was tucked into a plastic bag inside the pack. He’d gotten to the store just two minutes before it had closed.

He looked nervously up the street toward the block of abandoned projects. He wasn’t happy about being out after dark, in Black Viceroy territory. He had a gun, but so what? How many Viceroys would he run into? They’d all be armed.

“Wolfe…” came the gravelly voice, from the alley.

Wolfe stiffened, turning toward the alley. Then he remembered what Pearce had said. “Blank? That you?”

“Yeah. Come in here, outta the street lights…”

Wolfe crossed the sidewalk, stepped into the shadows. A silhouette stood there—the man’s breath plumed out into a slanting beam of street light. Blank stepped forward, just enough so that Wolfe could see his scar-blurred face, and a bit of his gnarled, burn-reddened hands.

Wolfe shuddered. He’d met Blank once before in a homeless encampment after asking people on the street how to find Pearce. But he hadn’t gotten a good look at Blank there, in all the smoke from the campfires and the uneven glow from the flickering flame light. Blank had listened to Wolfe’s enquiries, and approached him, claiming he could take a message to Pearce, for a price.

Wolfe had taken a chance—and Blank had come through. Was Blank the one who’d betrayed Pearce to the hitman that day? It seemed unlikely. Pearce seemed to trust Blank implicitly.

“Keep quiet a li’l minute here,” came Blank’s gurgling voice, as a group of young black men in black and orange hoodies coats went striding by.

Wolfe nodded and looked Blank over.

Blank wore a grubby overcoat that might have been black—or might have turned black; its lower hem was frayed almost like the fringe on a leather jacket; two of its large black buttons were missing. A wide brimmed, dented slouch hat angled almost rakishly on Blank’s head, half hiding one eye—instead of a hat band, the hat had a battery powered electric light strapped on it, a surprisingly powerful light, now switched off. Blank’s brown eyes were all that remained intact of his face—the rest of it had been burned away. Pink scar tissue from the old burns overlapped like bandages of raw flesh across his cheeks. His mouth had been burned lipless, and his snaggled, blackened teeth were perpetually visible. His nose was mostly burned away; one of his eyelids was just a parchment-like scrap of skin; his eyebrows were just a memory. His face looked, to Wolfe, like a face in a drawing that had been mostly erased by a hurried artist. There was no clear cut face there. That was one reason he was called Blank.

There was another reason, Wolfe knew. Blank lived off the grid, even when he walked around within the grid.

Many homeless people actually had cell phones. Cheap phones were given to them by family, or social services. They often used free computers in a library, or borrowed a friend’s laptop. Some homeless were ex-I.T. workers who’d been laid off one too many times, and still had a lot of tech when they could get it powered up.

But not Blank. Not only did he have no cell phone, he didn’t even have an electric watch, or a portable radio. He had no driver’s license, no state I.D., no social services I.D. No identification card at all. He had no wallet, and it was said he had no tattoos—or none that hadn’t been burned away. His fingers had been as badly burned as his face… so he had no fingerprints.

Facial recognition wouldn’t work on a man without a face. And he never told anyone his real name. People on the street knew him only by the moniker “Blank”.

Blank was blank.

“Wolfe…” Blank’s voice was a gurgling growl—his voice, too, was blank, without its original character, because his vocal chords had been burned by hot smoke in the nameless fire that had burned him so badly. Rumor had it that years ago, when he was first homeless, Blank had been sleeping in a crack house, and someone careless with his dope lighter had set the place on fire. Most people in the house had burned; Blank had gotten out… or part of him had.

But that story was just a rumor. Blank’s past was blank, too.

Wolfe could see why the scarred derelict was useful to Aiden Pearce. It was hard to trace Blank—which made him the perfect “bagman” and streetside go-between.

“They’re gone,” Blank said, turning toward the street.

Wolfe saw, then, that Blank’s left ear was missing. There was just a hole in the side of his head.

“Who was that?” Wolfe asked.

“Gangbangers. Viceroys.”

“You got a message for me?”

“Maybe. I’m just lookin’ in on you for Pearce.”

“He can look in on me anytime he wants, what I’ve seen.”

“You ain’t using the camera scrambler?”

“I am, yeah.”

“So he needs me to check on you while you’re out, at least in some places. ‘Nother thing, he just decided: you get the tool for sure. I’ll be telling you where to find it tomorrow. Meet me at noon….”

“Noon tomorrow. Okay. Where?”

“The camp where we first met.”

“That where you stay?”

Blank took off his hat for just a moment to wipe the top of his head with his hand… and Wolfe saw that most of the tramp’s hair had been burned away in that long ago conflagration. Only a few tufts of gray hair stuck out, in random spots.

Blank put his hat back on and said, “I don’t stay any place longer’n six or seven hours at most. Mostly not longer’n six or seven minutes. Got to keep moving! Not much use to anybody if I don’t keep moving.”

“Okay. The homeless camp under that same overpass, right? At noon. So—you have no cell phone… how does Pearce get in touch with you?”

“He has his ways. Puts messages up for me somewhere. They come and go quick and only I know what they mean. Uses what he calls ‘a drop’ too.”

“I know what that is.”

“Tomorrow at noon, Wolfe. Careful going back to that safehouse he’s got you in. Watch your back on the way there. And before you leave here, press the scrambler again for the cameras. The effect probably done wore off.”

Then he switched on the hat light, and went out of the alley… and Wolfe knew that the hat’s glare blurred his image when he walked under the cameras. His face was “faceless”—but a scarred face is recognizable too. The glare made him just a blur from the neck up, so they couldn’t even see his hat.

Wolfe waited a couple of minutes, then went out onto the sidewalk. There was no sign of Blank out there now. He was gone.

Wolfe had almost reached the partly pushed-over fence around the projects building when he realized that someone was following him.

He turned, and saw several black men in hoodies and sagging pants walking stolidly his way, their eyes locked on him.

Wolfe stepped onto the overturned fence, clambered over it, and hurried between the old, thickly tag-marked high rises. He went as fast as he could without running. Running would show fear, instead of respect. Showing fear was dangerous out here.

On the wall to his left was a big crown-shape, a cartoon of a king’s crown, stenciled in day-glo orange.Black Viceroys. No one had dared put their tags over that symbol.

He stepped over debris, boots crackling on broken glass, and strode quickly around a corner of the building to the left, and the now-doorless entrance of the high rise. Straight ahead through the door was a rubble-strewn corridor; to the right was the concrete and metal stairs he was going to take up to the seventh floor.

At least, he’d have done that if three more gangbangers hadn’t blocked his way.

They stepped out of the stairs, two of them carrying crowbars in their hands. The third one, the tall one in the middle with his hair dyed orange, had a 9 mm pistol in his waistband. Day-glo orange shoelaces were woven into his signature sneakers, and orange trim on his black vinyl windbreaker.

“Where you think you’re going?” the Black Viceroy asked. And the Viceroy put his hand on the butt of his 9 mm semi-automatic.