Outriders (21 page)

“I didn’t know it myself until recently,” Mr Self said. “But the Directorate’s trying to keep this one compartmentalized. Guess they figured I can keep a secret.”

“Rumor is you’ve got a good history of that.”

“Must not be
too
good if there are rumors,” Mr Self said with a smile.

“Sergeant Wright was just about to get me up to speed.”

Mr Self nodded and sat back down. “Still early, but I think we’ve got a good foothold to start from.”

Wright woke the second terminal and tapped a few keystrokes on the interface it projected onto the table. A moment later, the lights in the room went out with a short, sharp buzz. Lincoln looked over at Wright who was bathed in the glow from the terminal interface. She glanced up at the ceiling and then shook her head.

“It happens,” Wright said. “Don’t sweat it.”

She finished with the terminal, and the thin-skin on the wall lit up with a top-down view of a section of the city. Thumper came in just as Wright was beginning.

“What’s with the lights?” Thumper said.

“Power distribution’s not the best out this way,” Wright answered. “Mainline will probably come back on in a few minutes. We’re running everything on portable anyway. But you probably better plan on losing juice whenever you need it most.”

“Roger that,” said Thumper.

“All right. Apsis Solutions,” Wright said. “When they say full-spectrum security, they’re not kidding. Front page, they do all the usual stuff. Close protection, threat assessment, information security, nothing special there. But, come in through the side door, and you get a whole bunch of other services. In this case, for example, safehouses for people that don’t want to be found.”

“Or that
other
people don’t want found,” Mr Self added, without looking up from his terminal.

Wright walked over to the thin-skin and tapped it at a location near the bottom. At her touch, the image of the building turned blue.

“We’re here,” she said. Then, with her finger she circled a cluster of buildings a few hundred meters north. Within the circle she’d traced, labels popped up for several of the buildings and their surrounding streets. Street names were accurate, but the building labels were purely for convenience; for some reason, Wright had used the names of Shakespearean characters. “Safehouse is somewhere around here. We haven’t been able to get a fix on it yet, but we’ve narrowed it down to this area for certain.”

“And any idea who’s in there?” Lincoln asked.

“Not yet. But they’re taking a lot of measures to make sure we don’t find out.”

“You get any skeeters in?” Thumper asked.

“Nah. We tried, but they’ve got a net up. We’ve got a couple on station around the perimeter in case someone comes out. I didn’t want to risk tipping anybody off, though. They’re also masking the volume of traffic coming in and out of there, distributing it. Even so, it’s still running pretty hot for the area. Thumper, once you get set up, you should take a look at it and see what you can pull out.”

“Easy day,” Thumper said.

“What’s the assessment on security?” Lincoln asked.

“First look says about what you’d expect. Automated surveillance augmented with personnel. We’ve ID’d four return customers that fit the profile. I’m sure there are more we haven’t sniffed out yet.”

“Pop the sweeps up for me, would ya, Mir?” Thumper said. Wright walked back over to the terminal and keyed something in. A moment later, a series of multicolored arcs and circles appeared in the target zone.

“Blues for motion, greens for bioscan, reds for full capture,” Wright said. “You can see the gaps in coverage, but I’d chalk that up to us not finding them all yet. These guys don’t seem like the sloppy type.”

“You got makes and models for these yet?” Thumper asked. Wright shook her head.

Lincoln scanned the top-down without looking for anything in particular, just soaking in the big picture. “I’d like to get up there and walk it as soon as possible. When’s a good time?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it, sir,” Wright said. “Once Sahil gets in, we can handle the groundwork with good coverage. You just tell us what you need.”

“You’ve been over, I assume.”

“Sure, but Mom doesn’t care if
I
get scuffed up.”

“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t expect me to sit around here and make you do all the work, sergeant.”

“Actually, that’s exactly what he expects. He told me explicitly to keep you out of harm’s way on this one, sir.”

“He’s going to be disappointed.”

“We’ll see.”

Lincoln scanned the image on the thin-skin, and took mild satisfaction in knowing that whoever was in that safehouse probably wasn’t much more comfortable than they were.

“We’ll wait for Sahil,” Lincoln said. “And then I’m going to take a walk. You know. Just to clear my head.”

S
AHIL ARRIVED THREE HOURS LATE
, which had him in after dark. Unfortunately, he wasn’t on Lincoln’s side of the argument. Like Wright, he wasn’t a fan of the idea of Lincoln walking around the area at all, not to mention on his own. The other two weren’t much help. Sahil had helped haul the rest of Thumper’s gear up, and she was heads-down, bringing her AI-assisted surveillance system “Veronica” all online. Mike offered Lincoln some weak moral support, but seemed ambivalent at best about Lincoln doing anything other than running the op center. Lincoln got the impression that Pence was only on his side to get back at Wright for all the grief she’d given him over the car.

In the end, they’d compromised. The team agreed to let Lincoln out as long as Wright could escort him, with the assurance that she could pull the plug at any moment. Mike would be on standby in his getaway vehicle, in case there was trouble; Thumper rigged it up so Mike could have manual control if he needed it. Sahil would post up outside the zone but close enough to act as back up, and Thumper would man the temporary operations center, keeping watch over the whole team.

It all seemed excessive to Lincoln, but it was too early in the game for him to try pulling rank. Still, he did his best to make it clear he was letting them have their way this one time. He wasn’t sure any of them bought it.

Now he and Wright were walking through the outer perimeter of the cluster of buildings she and Pence had identified. It was always a tricky business to introduce yourself into a new environment without attracting the wrong kind of attention. Fortunately, there was more foot traffic in the area than there was back at the temporary HQ. Even though it was just a few blocks over, this section of town showed signs of more normal life. It was still clearly low on the economic end of things, but at least there were a few restaurants, grocers, and other small businesses on each side of the street. Still, the target zone wasn’t exactly the kind of place that seemed to attract a lot of tourists, and Lincoln knew any team serious about security wouldn’t just have their own people watching. They’d have developed a network of regular people to help them out: bartenders, grocery clerks, baristas, anybody with a routine and consistent interaction with the local populace. Casual connections, but ones that might give early warning of anything new or unusual.

Early in his career, Lincoln had nearly blown his team’s cover by buying a case of water after he’d told a clerk he was in town by himself for a couple of days. When internal security services had shown up later, he’d managed to persuade them that his religious beliefs required ritual washing eight times a day and that he didn’t trust the purity of his lodging’s water supply. It had taken a demonstration of said “ritual” and six bottles of water to convince them. That little caper had earned him a nickname from his team that, thankfully, hadn’t followed him through the rest of his career.

It’d been a good lesson, though; well worth the grief it had caused him amongst his teammates. And it was one that he kept in mind while checking out the streets in and around the target buildings.

Wright had already pulled in a fair amount of data on the area before they’d visited it, but it was a funny thing about surveillance technology: no matter how clear the images had gotten, or how good the audio, the eggheads still hadn’t been able to come up with a device yet that could capture and communicate the
feeling
of a place. They could fly a drone array through and then simulate a city block with pixel-perfect precision. Lincoln had prepared for many operations using those simulations. Not one of them had ever compared to actually walking the route himself.

Lincoln really wanted to get down into the heart of the target area, but he’d had to promise to keep to the outer perimeter until Thumper got a better read on the surveillance and counter-surveillance measures that Apsis had in place. He was helping on that front, though, and not just with his own eyes and ears. Thumper had rigged him up with a detector.

It was a simple device: just a belt with small, vibrating elements arrayed around it. Interpreting the signals wasn’t any more difficult than playing a game of hot-or-cold. The stronger the vibrations, the more signal was being detected. And depending on which elements were active, Lincoln could tell what direction he should head towards, or whether he was walking through the middle of a field. Thumper had fine-tuned the sensitivity to filter out the background levels of normal traffic. While they walked, directed by the whims of the strength-of-signal, the detector’s sensors soaked up whatever electronic signals he and Wright passed through and transmitted any relevant information back to Veronica, Thumper’s much-beloved surveillance system. Together, they were building a more complete picture of their area of operations.

They’d been at it for a little over an hour when they had their first hint of trouble.

“Captain,” Thumper said over comms, “I think you picked up some interest. Veronica’s tracking two men, one behind you, one across the street. Looks like they’ve been orbiting you for a few minutes.”

“Roger that, Thumper,” Lincoln said. “Mark ’em for us.”

“Marking,” she said, and then a moment later, “Marked.”

Lincoln ran a thumb across the dermal pad in his wrist and activated his retinal heads-up display. Two pips appeared, one at six o’clock and one halfway between eight and nine o’clock. Both Lincoln and Wright maintained their pace, and kept their eyes forward.

“You get that?” Lincoln asked Wright.

“Yeah,” she said. And then through the comm channel, “Thumper, can you get facial on them?”

“Negative,” Thumper said. “Skeeters are too high, and I can’t risk bringing them much lower.”

“All right, copy,” Wright said.

“Think we’re pegged?” Lincoln asked.

“I don’t see how you could be. But Veronica’s running the loop now, and they’ve definitely been reacting to your movements for a couple of minutes. It isn’t random. Take a right up ahead, let me watch what they do.”

At the next cross street, Lincoln and Wright turned right and continued on their way. The pips in Lincoln’s vision converged briefly, crossed over. One stayed fixed at six o’clock while the other worked its way gradually from six to eight.

“All right, yeah,” Thumper said. “They’re definitely trailing you. They just handed off. Guy in a black coat is on your tail now. Guy in a ballcap looks like he’s moving up a block. Guessing he’s going to rejoin you in a few.”

“Roger,” Lincoln said. “Designate Black Coat and Ballcap. Black Coat’s on our six?”

“That’s affirmative,” Thumper answered. “Black Coat is trailing you.”

“Could they pull a read on the detector?” Wright asked.

“Might be,” Thumper said. “It’s mostly passive, but it sends packets in bursts. If they knew what to look for, it’s possible, I guess. Maybe you should kill it, just to be safe.”

“Negative,” Lincoln said. “If they’re picking up some kind of signature off us, going dark will just be an admission of guilt. We’ll figure something out.”

“Ballcap’s circling back your way,” Thumper said. “He’s picking up the pace.”

“Give me range,” Wright said. A few moments later, distance indicators appeared next to the pips in Lincoln’s view. Black Coat was about fifteen meters behind them. Ballcap was farther, but closing.

“What else reads like a detector?” Lincoln asked.

“Not much,” she said. “Uh…”

“Come on, Thump, give me some options.”

“I don’t know, sir,” Thumper said. “Anything uh… anything that does burst transmission. Assuming they’re just picking up signal and not actually intercepting packets.”

“The idiot’s version, sergeant,” Lincoln said.

“Like… I don’t know, some kind of low-profile recording device, a tracker, uh… maybe a high-end–”

“Pence,” Wright said. “Come around, prep for a snatch. Thumper, find a spot, send us a marker. Somewhere close.”

“Copy,” Thumper answered. “Stand by.”

“You need me?” Sahil asked.

“Negative, stay put,” Wright responded.

A few moments later, another icon popped up in Lincoln’s augmented reality display; a small triangle pointing down at a location just a couple of blocks away.

“Pushing it to you now,” Thumper said.

“Roger, I see it. Pence, you got it?”

“Roger that,” Mike answered. “Maybe three mikes out.”

“Two’s better,” Wright said.

“I’ll see what I can do. Who’s the target?”

“I’ll handle it, just be there.”

Wright clearly had a plan and the team was executing it with smooth coordination. The fact that she hadn’t consulted him or asked for permission should have bothered him, but Lincoln knew in a moment like this, he had to swallow his pride and just let the team work. The best thing he could do was follow her lead.

“Ballcap’s catching up,” Thumper said. “And Veronica just picked up another possible threat heading your way.”

“How possible?” Lincoln asked.

“About thirty percent,” she answered. “He just changed direction, maybe to intercept. Maybe just because he forgot something.”

“Understood. Mark him.”

A third pip appeared, this one at about one o’clock. Black Coat and Ballcap were closing fast.

“Mir?” Sahil said over comms.

“Hold steady, Sahil,” she said. “Mike, how close?”