Drawing Dead (20 page)

“You can't contact this site?”

“Only the one I visited at first. I was contacted that one time, but I can't contact the—”

“The one you visited ‘at first'?” Cross said, making it clear he wasn't asking a question. “So you had to be a regular on
that
one.”

“Rape tapes,” Rhino said. “A back-channel site. One you found on your own. But you must have been looking at it plenty of times—that's what kicked in the AI program, the number of times you kept going back.”

“Is there any way I could leave this place alive?” the Asian asked.

“Already told you that. There's
one
way,” Cross said. “You tell us what you know—
everything
you know—and you walk away. You're no threat to us. But you still have to pay. That three mil waiting on you to cyber-transfer it out, you'll send it where we tell you to. That'll square it.

“But when I say ‘everything you know,' that's what I mean—you empty out, understand? Even if we don't ask a question, you keep draining until you're dry.”

“I will do that. All of that. But what assurances do I—?”

“Enough,” the gang leader said. “You can't contact some AI program, but it can contact
you,
right? That's part of the ‘everything' I just told you about. We need you alive—how else could we track it down when it comes up with another ‘competition'?”

The Asian closed his eyes again.

“Where shall I begin?” he said.

“YOU CAN
use this,” said a harsh, rumbling voice the Asian now recognized.

A laptop was placed before him. It was state-of-the-art, full-screen-sized. But the hand holding it made it seem like a child's toy.

“Sign on,” the voice said. “We don't even need to see your password.”

The Asian's laugh was thin. “But once I give this back, it would only take a few minutes to—”

“Take it with you,” Cross said. “It's top-shelf; a gift from us. Nothing on the hard drive but OS—Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome.”

The Asian tapped keys, lightly and rapidly. “I am logged on,” he said.

“See if the money is in that Macao account. You earned it as soon as you gave up the address of the house Ace bought for his wife and kids, right?”

Pekelo nodded. Keys tapped.

“Yes. All of it.”

“Transfer it to this one,” that terrifying voice said from behind him, dropping a slip of paper onto the laptop's keyboard. The Asian's brief glimpse of the hand that held the paper showed him the fingers were the size of the same fine cigars he kept in his office humidor. And the tip of the forefinger was missing.

Tap-tap-tap.

“Done,” the Asian said.

ANOTHER NINETY
minutes passed.

“That's all there is,” Cross said, assuring those in the darkness that nothing was to be gained by asking the same questions over and over again.

“You sure, boss?”

“Yeah.”

Buddha stood up and walked over to the desk, where he turned to face the Asian, his features barely visible in the gloom.

“You know what this is?” he asked, pointing at the large glass saucer on Cross's desk.

“An ashtray,” the Asian said.

“So you know what's in it.”

“Cigarette butts.”

“And ashes,” Buddha's subzero voice added.

“Yes.”

“You like the color?”

“It is just gray ash of some kind.”

“The kind you get from an incinerator,” Buddha said.

The Asian had opened his mouth to say something when a pair of boa-constrictor arms wrapped Buddha's biceps on both sides. “I'm sorry, Buddha,” the armor-muscled man said, his shiny skull reflecting the dim light. “Rhino told me not to let you—”

Buddha slumped in his chair as if surrendering, but Princess slipped his hands over the blank-eyed man's as if he expected the move.

“We promised to let him go,” Cross said, quietly.

“He will be our ally,” Tracker added.

The Asian's flat demeanor was stress-fractured, as if his face had been coated in aged-out pancake makeup.

“We need a time line,” Cross told the Asian, as if nothing had interrupted an ongoing conversation.

“It just…It just burst onto the screen.”

“Not just your screen, everyone who was qualified to log on, too.”

“Yes. It must have been so.”

“So there was nothing special about the target, was there?”

“The woman, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“No, no. It was just…like those old ‘Wanted' posters they used to hang in the post office. Her face wasn't on them. No woman's was.”

“Whose, then?”

“Yours,” the Asian said, not even hesitating a microsecond, as was his habit when confronted with any request for information.
What answer would best serve me?
“And one more. An Indian.”

Tracker stepped next to Cross.

“Yes,” the Asian said.

“Just the two of us?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. Just height/weight estimates. Not names, addresses…nothing like that.”

“When?”

“It was less than a month ago. I would have to access my own computer to be exact.”

“You can do that when you get back to your place. We'll give you a way to make contact to get us that info.”

“I promise I will—”

“Let him go, Princess,” Rhino's even quieter voice rumbled.

The Asian was almost to the back door when he realized that the behemoth wasn't referring to him. It was his last thought—Buddha's .177 hardball round was tumbling inside his brain before another synapse could complete its circuit.

“HE MUST
have put in a lot of work,” Cross said.

“Boss, you're really saying this had nothing to do with So Long?”

“Not what
that
guy was doing. He was trying to win a game. Gaming, he'd call it—competing against others. But it was a fixed fight. His edge was huge, but it was an accident—it wouldn't be enough for him to get paid. The tracing, from the pictures of me and Tracker, that was all his work.”

“I don't get this AI—”

“Buddha,” Rhino said gently, “a man with his intelligence, confined to a prison but given outside access through the Internet, he might…amuse himself in a number of ways. He chose those…tapes. He probably even gave those three foul things the idea of hitting minorities to put them even more beyond the reach of the ‘profilers' than they already were. Misdirection.”

“But So Long—”

“—knows me,” Cross said. “She's never seen Tracker, but she knows my face. Knows it good.”

“Boss, she'd never—”

“I don't think so, either. What would be in it for her? No, this Pekelo was just in the paper trail she needed to transfer all those properties, set up those bank loans, all that.”

“If he—that man in the house we exploded—if he didn't signal the Artificial Intelligence to hold off at some preset interval, it would go to work on its own,” Rhino said. “Revenge programming. It would target whoever was on its camera-feed. A
live
camera-feed, captured. That…man, he probably had the whole place rigged with lenses. Infrared, so even a full-black wouldn't stop it. Backup generators in case whoever came for him cut the electricity first. You and Tracker, the cameras would have your images. Nobody else's.”

“That's where the work came in,” Cross said, nodding. “This Pekelo had to find out who I was, first. Once he did that, then he could poke around until he got a lot of possible targets. But none of that would have meant a thing if he hadn't seen Ace's name—or Sharyn's name, most likely—on one of those transfer deeds.”

“So he set Ace up….”

“That was what the AI paid off on. Ace would go insane if Sharyn was killed. That would expose us all. Pekelo, by then, he'd know that. That's the flaw in all Artificial Intelligence—it can't go outside its own data.”