Watch Dogs: Dark Clouds

CHAPTER EIGHT

“How do I know you’re from DedSec?”

GlowWorm shrugged. “How do I know you’re Seline Garnera?”

“I’ve got military I.D., a passport, a driver’s license.”

He smiled. “I.D. doesn’t mean much. The government prints whatever fake I.D. it needs.” He was a young black in an old, worn out leather motorcycle jacket, skinny jeans and snakeskin boots; he had short dyed-blue hair, a pierced lower lip; he wore one of those circular stretcher earrings, that stretched the hole way out, and within the circular earring was a silver skull and crossbones. He had a considerable paunch but was otherwise remarkably skinny.

They were meeting in a retro-punk bar, near the waterfront in North Chicago. They were standing in a corner of the bar, each of them with a drink in their hands; he was drinking his, she was ignoring hers. They had to talk with their heads fairly close together, because The Misfits were booming from the jukebox. The meeting place had been set up via a fairly mysterious text that had come to her from a “GlowWorm”, after she’d asked an old friend from high school to find DedSec—her friend, Sue-Louise Cushman; Seline knew Sue-Louise had married a Chicago hacker, “Grimmy”, who had a lot of internet-underground connections. Grimmy was associated with Anonymous, with Digital Gangsters and, Seline suspected, with the secretive hacker revolutionary group DedSec itself.

GlowWorm was probably a friend of Sue-Louise’s husband.

“I’m takin’ a big chance being here,” Seline said.

“You are, huh? You look like a federal agent to me.”

“A federal agent!”

“You’re a clean-cut lady. You got a slick bearing.”

“That’s a military bearing. I told you I’m just out of the Marines.”

He grinned. “Hard to picture you as a jarhead in boot camp.”

“It was a little different than what men go through, but it was tougher than you could’ve taken.”

“Ha! You’re probably right about that!”

“Okay, you’re Seline, and you’re not a federal agent. I didn’t think you were, because… our mutual friend set this up… But I came here without a mask. I mean, normally, if I met a stranger in anything relating to DedSec, I’d wear a mask to the meeting, someplace else out of the public eye, but out of respect for Grimmy… He bailed me out of jail, he did a lot for me… And since you insisted on no masks…”

“I’m not going to trust somebody who wears a mask to meet me.”

He shrugged. “Those are some of the only people I trust.”

“I don’t have the… the thing with me,” Seline said.

“I wouldn’t be here if I thought you did. You can put it on a flashdrive and get that to me later, if we decide to move ahead with this. So you told Grimmy’s wife you got this off a CIA agent?”

She glanced nervously around. “I did. She transferred it to my phone. It took me a while to figure out how it was… how it was coded into the jpeg.”

“She used a picture to code it? I’ve heard of that.”

“It’s an extensive file on her investigation into some military guys. She got the story from a soldier named Wolfe. A Delta Force guy. Wolfe ended up in military prison but… she always thought he was telling the truth. She couldn’t prove it well enough to protect herself and to get him out of jail. And then when she was getting close she started worrying that some Marine on board the ship was… stalking her. I mean—to kill her. A Sergeant named Callow.”

“This was on a ship?”

“I was stationed on the USS Don Roeser.”

“That’s a big flattop, isn’t it? An aircraft carrier?”

She nodded. The song was changing on the jukebox and they waited till the new song started—a song by Tool.

“A carrier,” she said, when the song was wailing and thundering along. She leaned close enough to talk into GlowWorm’s ear. “She disappeared off the ship. Someone spread rumors she was drunk and fell off the fantail. But I think someone hit her, knocked her out… and threw her overboard.”

“They find her body?”

“What was left of it, about five days later.”

GlowWorm grimaced. “I’ll do some fact checking on some of this stuff—I have to warn you about that. But it’ll be done with the utmost secrecy. Won’t be discussed in any chat rooms, nothing like that.”

“You mean—hack into some files?”

“Yeah.”

“A lot of it’s classified. You might not be able to get to it.”

“I can confirm you were on that ship. And probably that this woman who gave you the file was there… but not that she was in CIA. What was her name?”

“Ruth Medina.”

“Okay. You sure you want to leak these files?”

“Yes. It’s what I came here to do. Sue-Louise said I had to come in person and meet with somebody. I thought about sending it to you over the internet…”

He shook his head. “What with the new NSA programs, all that—no. We have our ways around that stuff but it’s safer to use a flashdrive to get it to us.”

“I don’t trust wikileaks anymore. You sure you can get this out on SystemLeaks?”

He nodded. “If we decide we want to do it. We don’t want anybody to make a fool of us…”

“This is for real. Ruth died for it.”

“Yeah. I’d hate to die for it myself.” He smiled crookedly. “But if you can risk your life, Seline… I guess I can risk mine too.”

Lou Kiskel was worried. He didn’t like this neighborhood, especially at almost nine-thirty at night. It was close to downtown but looked pretty shabby to him. He was more comfortable in Chicago’s “Gold Coast” neighborhood, on a street like Dearborn.

It was cold out here, too, despite his long two-thousand-dollar camel hair coat. Kiskel was almost sixty, getting fat, and regretted making this overture to Pearce. But he did owe Pearce a few favors and he did want to do the right thing. What would happen to Blume if things continued the way they’d been going?

Still—being out here on a teeth chattering night. Not desirable… And here came a wino, or a homeless person of some kind anyway, going to ask him for spare change.

“Kiskel?” said the deformed man in the floppy hat, in a gurgling growl.

Kiskel gaped at him. He looked around, then said, in a hoarse whisper. “You’re from… Pearce?”

“I am. See that big flowerpot in front of the old hotel across the street? There’s a phone in it. Phone’s not good for anything except this one call. After this call, it’ll melt. So don’t keep it in your hand after he hangs up.”

“Uh—okay. Should I give you some money?”

“He already paid me. What—you think I’m a bum or something?” The man made a low cackling sound that might’ve been laughter as he walked away.

Kiskel looked around, saw no appreciable traffic, and jaywalked, making a beeline for the flowerpot in front of the funky old Wiggins Hotel.

It was one of those big antique hip-high pots, this one cracked and occupied only by a dusty artificial plant, cigarette butts crowding it. He couldn’t see a phone—wait, the cigarette butts were piled up in one place. He dug under them, found the phone, shoved it in his pocket and hurried on.

Kiskel went fast as he could without running, around the corner to his car. Before he got there he used his key control to tell the Jaguar to fire up its heaters. He got into the warm car, locked it, and, hands shaking from the cold, activated the phone.

A man’s face appeared on the screen. The man had a black kerchief bandit’s mask pulled up to cover much of his face under his leather billed cap, but Kiskel knew it was Aiden Pearce.

“Kiskel,” Pearce said. “I can’t stay on this frequency long. Let’s get this done. You really got something I should know?”

“It’s just… you asked about Verrick. If I had anything interesting on him.”

“And you acted like you didn’t want to help me.”

“Okay, well, I thought it through. He’s going to destroy the company if he isn’t stopped. And… he’s up to something else too. I don’t know what it is, but it feels shady. Could be illegal in a big way.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Nothing I can prove—it’s just the way Verrick’s covering things up. Where his investment money came from. I mean—I’m not Blume CFO anymore, I’m mostly just doing consulting for Blume, but Verrick was pretty mysterious about his investors and there were rumors of money laundering.”

“Rumors from where?”

“Not at liberty to say. I know he met with a cop named Tranter more than once, and I don’t know why, or anything about it, but he’s not talking to rest of us about these meetings. His secretary told mine, but…”

“I’m limited on what I can find out right now. Somebody’s been trying to shoot me in the head.”

“What? Right now?”

“No—they tried recently and they’re likely gonna try again. I’m saying, if you can find out anything more…”

“I do know one thing. He’s connected with a real estate investor from Idaho. Owns land all over the country—made his nut in Florida and Montana. I heard at the club this guy’s got serious connections to white imperialists.”

“And who’d that be?”

“His name’s Marlon Winters. Billionaire. He’s on the Iceberg Investments board of directors along with Verrick. So he knows your pal Verrick.”

“Marlon Winters. I’ve heard the name. Anything else?”

“Ally of mine in Blume has suspicions that Verrick is lining up money—from Winters amongst other people—to buy a whole hell of a lot more of Blume’’s shares. And he’s hinting that the price of those shares may ‘suddenly go down’. Verrick might be planning to take over Blume!”

“That’s interesting. Thanks, Kiskel. You’re one of the good ones. They keep trusting people like you at Blume. I may buy some shares myself. But not if Verrick takes over.”

Pearce chuckled—and cut the connection.

Kiskel stared at the blank screen, then remembered what the deformed man in the floppy man had said.

He just managed to get the driver’s side window down before smoke started to hiss from the seams of the cell phone.

He tossed it out the window—and watched it melt into slag on the sidewalk.

Lou Kiskel shuddered, closed the window, and drove hastily away.

Mick Wolfe was standing across the street from the old Elks Lodge on 77th. The Elks no longer owned it; they had sold the place, and taken their sign down, but it was a classic big city lodge building. Built in the mid 20th century, it was designed to be an auditorium as well as a meeting place. It was in the general style of an old Greek temple, but with concrete elk heads at the corners as spouts and chipped old columns holding up the big triangular gable.

If this was another lodge of some kind now, as Keeting had hinted, it was sure one that had its meetings late at night. Wolfe glanced at his watch—the time was nearly eleven-thirty.

The Hawk sheered and veered, chasing pieces of newspaper and fast-food wrappers ahead of it, as Wolfe crossed the street.

It had been Pearce, not Keeting, who’d gotten him here tonight.

“Wolfe? Wake up!”

Wolfe had been asleep, stretched out on the closed sofa bed. “What? Pearce? Couldn’t you just call me on the phone?”

“No.” Pearce was up on that television screen again. “Listen, I’ve been doing a search for people associated with Stan Grampus. Only one I could find who might be in Chicago is named Winters. Grampus used to work for Winters—but there’s no clear record of what Grampus did for him. Does seem though that Winters and Grampus have some obscure ideology in common… And tracing Winters, I find he’s in town. And he’s called for a limo to take him to a place on 77th… Here’s a picture of Winters…”

And now Wolfe, crossing the street, was trying to figure out how to get into that old lodge on 77th, which normally would’ve been easy. Only it wasn’t easy now. There were three guys out front in civilian coats, identical British macs—but Wolfe knew instantly they were military-trained. Chances were, judging from the comm earpieces and the fact that one of them had a G within an eagle tattoo on his neck, they were Graywater Security. Mercenaries. Some of these Graywaters were fumbling idiots, but some of them were good at their job, and all of them were heavily armed thugs with itchy trigger fingers. Which made all of them dangerous.

Wolfe had the .45 he’d appropriated from Keeting under his coat, and he’d bought extra ammo for it. He had the .38 as a backup pistol. But he had no desire to shoot it out with Graywater Security on the streets of Chicago. If he lived through it he’d end up shooting it out with cops and maybe a S.W.A.T. team.

No, time to use covert entry training…

Wolfe walked up to one of the Graywater Security men, looked at him with a vacant expression, then walked past. He just wanted to get close enough to get a sense of what weapons these guys might have under their coats. Wolfe thought he’d made out just enough of an outline under the guy’s left arm— a machine gun pistol, probably a Mack 10.

Wolfe walked away, muttering nonsense to himself so the merc would dismiss him as a homeless crackpot. “I told ’em don’t talk to me like my ma, my ma wouldn’t say that…” Wolfe said.

He heard the Graywaters laughing at him. And that was good.

Wolfe kept walking past the building, on past the next one, a closed-down Dollar Store, then cut into the narrow walkway between the empty Dollar Store and the SRO flophouse on the corner. He stepped over a shapeless pile of rain-mushed paper trash and went to an old garbage can lying on its side. He turned the can over and set it up, and climbed up on it, jumping from there to the lower rung of the fire escape’s hinged ladder. His weight pulled the ladder down on its spring till his boots touched the ground.

Wolfe climbed up the ladder, easing it back into place slowly from the first landing, so it wouldn’t clang, then he climbed the rest of the rusty old fire escape to the roof.

It was windy, cold and dark up here, outside the cones of light from the streetlights. He could see a handful of baleful stars through a temporary break in the clouds.

Wolfe worked his way across the roof, circling old brick chimneys and vents, stepping over puddles formed where the black tar roofing sagged.

A cigarette lighter flared on the next roof over—the roof of the former Elks’’ auditorium. Wolfe ducked down behind an air conditioning duct, then slowly lifted up till he could see the guard’s face illuminated by the momentary red glow. The mercenary snapped the Zippo shut and darkness closed down around him except for the orange coal of his cigarette.

The cigarette’s coal blotted out as the man turned away. Wolfe smiled and advanced again, hunched down, placing his steps to make as little noise as possible.

He got to the edge of the roof abutted against the next building, stepped over, then ducked behind a chimney as the mercenary turned around and exhaled smoke, the red eye of his cigarette winking.

Wolfe wondered if he should take down the guy the hard way, or the easy way. He didn’t know anything about this guy. Some of the Graywater mercenaries had been Special Forces, in their times; at least the mercs who knew what they were doing. This guy could be Special Forces. He could be someone Wolfe had known. He could even have been Delta Force once. Be a shame to kill him unnecessarily. If any of these mercenaries tried to kill Wolfe, then Wolfe would defend himself with lethal force. But until then…

Besides, Wolfe didn’t have a sound suppressor on his gun. If he shot the guy he would alert the other Graywaters on the sidewalk below.

Unless he wanted to break the guy’s neck, he’d have to take a chance on trying to knock him out.

Wolfe sighed. Would’ve been so much easier to shoot him.

Watching around the edge of the brick chimney, Wolfe waited till that cigarette glow blotted again, then he crept around the chimney, pulled the .45 out, rushed up and buffaloed the sentry Wyatt Earp-style, cracking him hard behind the right ear with the barrel of the gun.

The sentry’s knees buckled, and he went down. He seemed out cold. Wolfe reached down, disarmed the man, and took the small flashlight off the mercenary’s belt.

Wolfe regretted not bringing along something to tie and gag the guard with. No time for that. They’d have a check-in on the ear comm. In a few minutes the sentry would be asked to report in, and when he didn’t reply…

Better get this scouting trip over pronto.

Wolfe took out the PearcePhone, and set it up to pick up the comm frequency. It took a little less than a minute to locate the channel they were using.

“Five, this is one, how you doing out front?”

“We’re cold and bored down here, One, what you think? But I got eyes on Two and Three. Everything quiet.”

“Copy that. Four, everything quiet on the roof?”

Wolfe tapped “hack into conversation” and, making his voice hoarse, said, “All clear up here.” He coughed. “But cold as a witch’s tit. Gettin’ laryngitis or some damn thing.”

“I can hear that in your voice, Four! We’ll send you relief in an hour…”

An hour. That should be enough time…

Flashlight, phone and .45 tucked away, silenced Mack 10 in his hand, Wolfe moved to the outbuilding on the roof that housed the entrance to the stairs. It was unlocked. He went inside, into a rising column of warm air and the musty smells of an old building.

He came to the door that led onto the top floor, pressed it open—and got lucky. There was a Graywater sentry walking down the hallway to Wolfe’s right, but he had his back turned.

Wolfe eased the door almost shut and peered through the crack, watching—till he saw the sentry turn the corner into an adjoining hall.

Opening the door as quietly as he could, Wolfe slipped through, closed the door, and moved off to the left. He turned the corner, hurried to the end of a short corridor, and opened the only door. It was dark in there.

Wolfe stepped through, closed the door behind him. He took out the flashlight, shone it around the room. Much of it was stacked with old theater seats; a big plaster Elks Lodge seal was leaning against the wall wrapped in cobwebs. To the right, a wooden ladder was built into the wall, rising to a padlocked trapdoor.

Wolfe slung the Mack 10 on its strap over one shoulder, put the small flashlight in his mouth, and climbed the ladder. It took three sharp karate punches, using the heel of his hand—with Wolfe wincing at the noise from each blow—to break the padlock bracket.

He pushed the trapdoor back and, flashlight bobbing in his mouth, climbed up to the attic. It was mostly rafters and dust here, he discovered, as he flashed the light through the low, narrow space. But on the right were pulleys with ropes looped tautly over them, probably relating to the curtains for the auditorium down below.

Wolfe closed the trapdoor and, hunched over, worked his way down a wooden walkway, two boards wide, laid over the rafters. He could hear an amplified speaker now, from below; points of light from the stage winked in the dust, here and there. Applause came periodically from the unseen audience.

On the right side, about the center of the attic, a shaft of attenuated light rose up. Wolfe made his way to the beam of light and lay on the boards, looking down at the stage to find he was staring directly at the top of the speaker’s head. He had a bald spot. The man was speechifying at a podium, reading from notes. No telling who he was, from here. Maybe that Marlon Winters character?

In the attic, the speaker’s voice was distorted and muddied by echoes, but Wolfe could hear most of what he said. “…the second and tenth amendments are under attack… There are forces in this country that have worked toward undermining the civilization that the founders of our Western European heritage have worked so hard to build!” Build, ild, ild…

“We are threatened from every side!” the speaker boomed. “Socialism pops its ugly head up any time you don’t flush its holes out with poison—like the holes of rabid gophers!” Gophers, ers, ers…

Western European heritage, Wolfe knew, was speech code for the White Race. But “rabid gophers”? That summoned up some interesting images…

“Purity is not just about saving our culture, our right to bear guns, and our right to a free market without regulations. We have created Purity to defend civilization itself against the forces who would erect a New World Order in its place, an order controlled by a dictatorship that will enslave us to decadent cultures and mud races!” Races, aces, aces…

The crowd roared and clapped with approval at that one.

“And now, I’d like to introduce General Van Ness, who will talk about strategy on the ground… and the development of militias that will take control of our streets following the coming chaos…” Chaos, os, os…

Applause. The Elks Club, Wolfe thought, would not be happy at all if they found out who it was who’d bought their old theater. Racist insurrectionist scumbags.

The microphone started feeding back and Van Ness had a mumbling way of expressing himself so Wolfe could only make out occasional phrases. “…while we cannot discuss the means of setting the stage for…” Something, something. “And hence all we’re asking you is to be ready for the call to…” Something something. “…I have stood up for the values of Western European…” Something something. “…but in North Africa we saw again and again that whenever the locals were… And thus… and so you see… but again, we cannot… Yet the time will soon come to…”

Wolfe gave up. He had another agenda to follow up on. He had to see if he could find Stan Grampus here—Grampus, the assassin who’d tried to kill Aiden Pearce.

It was important to find the bastard, fast. Sooner or later, the Graywater bunch was going to realize that one of their own was down… and that something was up.

Aiden Pearce was using the encrypted comm system to talk to Pussler on a computer monitor. And Pussler looked worried.

Pussler kept glancing over his shoulder at the door, then looking pensively back at the webcam. “Boss… I’m telling you I don’t feel safe here.”

“That’s one of my own safehouses. The idea is: a safehouse is safe, Pussler. Right? No one knows about the place but you, me, Blank, and Merwiss. So if anyone’s made out you’re hiding out there, it’s because you stuck your dumb head outside and got noticed. I told you to lay low!”

“I did lay low, boss! Ever since you told me that one of those ambulance guys told Tranter who I was…”

“He wasn’t supposed to know who you were.”

“Well, see, that EMT recognized me! I used to ride those ambulances regular, when I was using that synthetic morph!” Pussler grimaced. “I swear that stuff gave me overdoses about every third time I used it…”

“So why’d you keep using it, Pussler?”

“Well, ‘cause it’s what I could get. Keepin’ it real, I’m a drug addict. Or I was… I’m trying to stay clean, boss, and all I got here is… ah, almost nothing.”

“That girlfriend of yours been coming around?”

“No! She don’t know where I am! Boss—you got other safehouses that Merwiss doesn’t know about, right?”

“Merwiss?” Was Pussler really worried about Merwiss? The programmer had seemed harmless enough… although there were recent indications of a gambling problem.

“Merwiss knows about two of the safehouses,” Pearce said. “The one you’re in and the one over on the waterfront.” Pearce was careful to keep some of his safehouses known only to himself. “There’s three more he doesn’t know about. Including the one that Wolfe is in.”

“You gotta let me move into one of those others! I don’t trust Merwiss!”

“Why?”

But Pearce himself had wondered if Merwiss might’ve been the one who’d tipped off Tranter and Grampus to the meeting the day they’d tried to kill him. Merwiss theoretically hadn’t known about the meeting. Even Pussler hadn’t known till minutes before attack. But Merwiss had helped set up the cryptography that Pearce had used that day to talk to Pussler. He could have monitored the call and decrypted it, if he was fishing for inside information.

And there was another reason to suspect Merwiss. That gambling addiction. That made him vulnerable to being bought off. Pearce had recently discovered that Merwiss was in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He hadn’t been in debt when Pearce had hired him. Apparently he’d been “clean” from gambling for years. But he’d had a relapse into throwing away his money in the casinos soon after starting work for Pearce. He claimed to be in therapy for it now. But maybe he’d sold Pearce out to pay off that debt…

“Why do you think someone’s onto you there, Pussler?” Pearce asked.

“I heard a weird noise in the hall outside the door. I looked through the peephole and there was some guy hustlin’ away. It was a fat guy so I thought it might’ve been Merwiss but I wasn’t sure.”

Could Merwiss be monitoring this line? Pearce wondered.

“Pussler,” Pearce said. “The mask is going up, right here and right there.”

“Uh—okay,” Pussler said. He cut the line and his face vanished from the screen.

The mask is going up was code for, “I’m going to deal with this myself”. Meaning that Pearce was coming over there in person.

Pearce wasn’t fully recovered from his concussion, but there was no one else he trusted besides Blank and Wolfe. Blank never got involved in anything violent. He was only a go-between. He couldn’t handle this. And Wolfe was on an assignment, up to his neck in it at that old lodge auditorium.

Pearce had to handle this himself. It might be that Pussler was just being paranoid…

Still, Pearce had to know for certain.

He strapped on his favorite pistol, put on his leather overcoat and his cap, and hurried out the door.

Wolfe decided to take his chances in the crowd.

Probably none of these people knew him. Lots of them were casually dressed; and lots of them were openly armed. Being militia types, some of them wore Army coats from Military Surplus. His own stripped-down Army coat would fit right in.

He’d found a crawl space that took him over the audience, and then over the balcony. From there he climbed down a maintenance ladder into another storeroom and, casually as he could, sauntered out to the balcony. The place was jam-packed, mostly with men, everyone staring raptly at the stage. Nearly every seat was taken. From the look of these chuckleheads, there must be some major militia types in here, including some the feds would like to know about. And who was that? It was the Dousch Brothers, sitting together like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, surrounded by obvious bodyguards. The fat, lumpy-faced brothers were oil industry tycoons notorious for their “astroturfing” anti-environmentalism and anti-liberalism. Rumor had them connected to neo fascist groups based in Switzerland.

There were two more Graywater mercs up in the balcony, weapons on straps over their shoulders. One had an Uzi, the other had a Mack 10. Both sentries were listening to Van Ness speak from the stage.

Van Ness. Wolfe struggled with an urge to take a shot at Van Ness from the shadows of the theater, just blow him away right here and now. The son of a bitch had ruined Mick Wolfe’s life. Van Ness had trashed his reputation and got him tossed in the brig for a year. And what a miserable year it had been. Only the exercise room, a couple of friends to play chess with, and the prison library had made the Army’s disciplinary barracks bearable.

Maybe just one squeezed-off burst at Van Ness with the suppressed Mack 10. He could go back up to that attic and shoot him from above, and then…

Wait, was that Stan Grampus over there, sitting toward the top of the balcony? The guy who’d tried to kill Pearce?

It was. His face was sharply recognizable to Wolfe after all that image enhancement.

Grampus was sitting in the back row of the balcony, right next to Winters. The hitman was frowning with concentration, trying to make out what Van Ness was saying, despite the mic feedback and echoes, and Winters, a white-haired man with a broad red face, was smiling with satisfaction at the gathering—like the cat that slowly tortured, eviscerated, and finally ate the canary.

Grampus was twitching in his chair, squirming about as he tried to pay attention to the speaker. Wolfe remembered that the police file said Grampus had an amphetamine habit. Looked like he’d popped some pills not long before the show.

Stan Grampus had swept-back black hair, his gaunt face decorated with a goatee. On the side of his neck was a clumsy blue tattoo of an iron cross. He was a small, wiry looking man wearing a brown leather jacket, a black shirt with a turquoise bolo tie. Somewhere under that coat he was sure to be armed, probably with a nine millimeter pistol.

Wolfe walked up the carpeted stairs along the aisle, trying to get above Grampus, to keep him in view.

The general plan, now that he had a sense of what this joyful little convocation of lunatics was about, was to follow Grampus and hopefully find out who he worked for. But maybe Grampus’s real boss was already apparent—sitting right next to him. Maybe it was Marlon Winters, and by extension, Verrick, since they were both on the board of directors of the mysterious Iceberg Investments.

Wolfe reached the top of the stairs where a carpeted walkway stretched horizontally behind the highest row of seats. Grampus and Winters were on the farther side, a few rows down…

But coming up the stairs near them was a Graywater sentry, looking narrowly at Wolfe.

Wolfe turned the other way, as if searching for a place to sit. He still had the Mack 10 on his shoulder. But there were a lot of guys sitting in the audience proudly displaying their firearms…

Might’ve got myself in a crazy tight place here, Wolfe thought sourly. If this armed audience gets the word and turns against me…

He’d once asked a medic how many times a man could get shot and live. The medic had said, “Depends where they shoot you, dummy. What else? Once in the head will kill you if they get you right between the eyes. But people’ve been shot three times in the head and lived because the bullets didn’t go into the most vital parts of the brain. I’d guess four times would be the max, though, for the skull. But maybe you could take fifty times in the legs and live—if, you know, you don’t bleed to death…”

Wolfe wasn’t anxious to test out these theories today.

He took the PearcePhone out, adjusted the device so it transmitted to the Bluetooth device he had hidden within his ear. He heard himself being discussed:

“Yeah, Four’s down here with blood all over his head. Somebody sneaked up on him and cracked him a good one. He swears he never gave that response on the phone, One. So that means the bastard is infiltrating, he’s probably right here in the building…”

Uh-oh. The sentry on the roof had woken up.

Wolfe flicked the phone onto, “Blot out all local phones except this one.”

That should keep them from communicating. But it was probably too late…

“You!” barked a Graywater merc coming toward him. “What you doing with that Mack 10! We don’t allow any automatic weapons in here! Drop it—now!”

This wasn’t good.

Wolfe waved at him and said, “I’ll take it out to my car!” he spun on his heel and saw that the other Graywater guard, alerted by the report from Four, was raising an AK47, not bothering to yell a warning. The AK sputtered and bullets zipped close to Wolfe’s right side. Some of the audience members yelled in alarm; a lot of them ducked down. But it wouldn’t be long before some of the militia audience would be up hunting for a target with their side arms, eager to prove themselves.

Wolfe snapped the Mack 10 up and fired it, all in a split second—and he was a better shot than the guard. The merc caught the auto pistol rounds in the teeth, and got them blown out the back of his head. He staggered back and fell, and Wolfe ran down toward the dying guard, knowing the one who’d shouted at him to drop his weapon was not far behind.

“Get down!” Wolfe shouted, as the now-alarmed crowd milled and buzzed. “There’s some lunatic with a gun who’s gotten in here!” He was taking the steps downward three and four at a time, hoping the audience would mistake him for one of the guards. “Get down, folks! We got your backs here! Hold your fire!”

“Stop him!” said the guard behind Wolfe. But Wolfe noticed the merc hadn’t opened fire—too much risk of hitting the audience, the people he’d been hired to protect.

Wolfe had reached the bottom row, where most of the audience members were heading for the exits. Others were waving guns around, shouting incoherently, looking for a target. Wolfe pointed at the sentry up on the stairway, the merc pounding down after him.

“There he is!” Wolfe shouted. “He’s infiltrated the place!”

That wasn’t going to work long—but it kept the crowd confused and occupied long enough that Wolfe could slip past those remaining in the front row of the balcony. A bullet from somewhere on the stage below cracked by close overhead. Then Wolfe ran to the storage room door, yanked it open, slipped inside, and slammed it shut behind him. The metal door immediately dented inwardly, in two places where bullets struck it. Wolfe found a pile of chairs to one side and tipped them over in front of the door to block it. Then he climbed the ladder to the crawl space.

He scrambled along the crawl space, going toward the street, away from the stage this time. A tense three minutes, trying not to cough in all the dust, and then he had gotten to the back wall over the corridor he’d first come to.

Wolfe looked around, found no egress except a dust-caked metal vent that gave onto the outside wall. Wolfe sat, leaned back, and kicked out the vent. It pivoted out to the right and hung from a rusty hinge. He looked through the opening, found he was at the front of the building over a small marquee. It was not a short drop but doable.

There was just room to squeeze through—he hoped. Be embarrassing to die stuck in this vent hole. He decided he had to abandon the Mack. It would get in the way climbing through and it might go off if he dropped it—which could alert the guards to his position.

He tossed the auto pistol aside in the crawl space, then squirmed through the vent, feet first and face down. He could hear the crowd rushing out the front doors, some of them in a panic, some shouting at the others not to rush, not to go nuts with their weapons. Hold your fire, damn you!

Fitting through the vent gap at the shoulders was painful—Wolfe almost put a shoulder out of joint. But then he was through, hanging from his hands in the cold night air. He let go and dropped—almost thirty feet down. The noise from the crowd hid the sound of his drop onto the lower roof. It stung, and his shoulders hurt, but he was intact.

Wolfe drew his .45, crossed the tarpaper base of the marquee support, to the right side.

There—the limo. It was Winters, getting in… and a Crown Victoria was pulling up behind it. Wasn’t that the car Tranter had driven that day?

And Grampus was getting into it…

Wolfe couldn’t follow both men. He’d have to tail the car transporting Grampus. If he could get down there… but just below him was one of the Graywaters, hurrying past, gun in his hand, looking for Mick Wolfe.

Wolfe pulled out the PearcePhone, tapped for one of its specialized apps, and just as the limo and the unmarked car were pulling away from the curb into the one way street, he used the ctOS hack to turn the traffic lights at the corner, suddenly turning them from green to red, no yellow in between. The cars just getting to the corner screeched to a halt. A minivan was rear-ended—just a fender-bender. The Crown Victoria and the limo were stuck in honking traffic, for the moment.

But those Graywater thugs were still down there, looking for Wolfe. He could kill them—or plunge them into a different kind of darkness.

Wolfe hacked into the ctOS power grid controls, then hit Blackout, four block radius.

A second passed. Two, three, four. Maybe it wasn’t going to work. And he heard someone shouting from the roof. Had they spotted him from up there?

Then the darkness fell over the street in a series of expanding blackouts zones, light after light going out. In seconds it was pitch dark outside, except for the swiveling headlights of the cars.

The blackout increased the panic on the street. The crowd still streaming from the building milled and shifted, people running chaotically by.

Wolfe put the phone and his gun away, climbed over the edge of the lodge sign, and dropped down into the darkness, narrowly missing a huffing man hurrying past. Wolfe flattened against the building, watching for the Graywater thugs. They were as hard to see out on this dark street as he was.

Wolfe decided he was pretty well hidden, and pushed his way through the crowd, almost getting knocked over in the darkness, to a car illegally parked on the sidewalk, maybe belonging to Graywater. It was a late model SUV. He pulled out his phone, found the app, and used it to trigger the car’s electronic locks. The SUV unlocked and the engine started for him before he’d even gotten in. He got behind the wheel, keeping his head down as much as he could. Up ahead he could see the Crown Victoria carrying Grampus had wormed its way through the traffic to the corner, and was just turning right.

Wolfe hacked into ctOS again, switched on the neighborhood power, turned the traffic lights on, and then drove to the corner—and turned right. The Crown Victoria was just a half a block up ahead…