That Nietzsche Thing (7 page)

I found O’Day outside, sitting on the
tailgate of the EMT’s truck, breathing through an oxygen mask. He
was black with soot, and his clothes looked singed. Damn fool must
have tried to run into the fire to save his servers.

“You okay, Day?” I asked as I approached. The
campus quad was awash with the dancing lights of fire trucks. “What
the hell happened?”

We lifted the mask from his face and wheezed
in a breath. “Fucking Genies,” he gasped. “A whole mob of
them.”

“Genies did this?” I looked back at the
server room. The firefighters were rolling up their hoses. It
wasn’t like Genies to do anything wantonly destructive. Most were
far too whacked out to every consider orchestrating any sort of
attack.

“Yes, I’m telling you,” O’Day said, returning
the mask to his face. “Fucking Genies!” he screamed through the
breather. “Crazy as shit! Just burst into the place and started
smashing shit! I got out through the back door, but when they set
my racks on fire...”

“Bad?” I asked, nodding in sympathy.

O’Day lowered the mask. “Bad? There’s three
million bucks of equipment in there, Sasha, that they tried to
torch!”

“They take anything? Give you any idea what
you did to piss them off?”

“Yes,” O’Day said, calming himself. He took a
few breaths off the mask then continued. “They came in, screaming
that they wanted the book, calling me a foul blasphemer, that sort
of thing. When they found that e-reader of yours, that’s when they
started trashing the place. Thanks again, Sasha.”

“Shit, Day, I’m sorry.”

“You know who those assholes were, don’t
you?” O’Day said, giving himself a coughing fit.

“That’s not possible,” I shook my head.

“Where did you get that e-reader, Sasha?” he
asked, recovering from his hacking. “Nobody’s seen or heard from
the Rosicrucians for over twenty years, and then ten minutes after
helping you out, they show up on my door and try to burn down my
lab! Shit, Sasha, what was really on that e-reader?”

“You tell me?” I said, defensively. “You said
it was just a copy of Q.”

“It was,” O’Day agreed, putting his mask back
over his face. “It was...” he mumbled, then removed his mask. “Now,
they’re trying to destroy every
digital
copy of
Dark’s
Last Novel
? They’re going to be pretty busy.”

“No,” I scratch at my stubbly chin. “I found
it at a murder scene. The Rosicrucians were covering their tracks.
There must have been a way to track the e-reader back to them. Or,
at least, they thought there was. Can you do that?”

“You can now,” O’Day said. “Before they stole
it, I factory reset the device. Logged it in to my account. The
lowjack will lead you right to them.”

I laughed. “Good job, O’Day. You’ll make a
good cop, yet.”

“Thanks,” O’Day said with no mirth. “But I’ve
had enough excitement for the time being.” He shook his head. “Why
did they have to burn my lab?”

“Must have thought you were trying to decode
Q. They couldn’t stand for that.”

“God, I hope the disk arrays survived the
Halon...”

“Thanks for everything,” I said, squeezing
O’Day’s shoulder. “Sorry for the mess. Let me know when you have
their location on the lowjack, okay?”

“Will do,” O’Day said, grumpily. “And
Sasha?”

“Yeah?”

“Next time you need something decoded,” O’Day
gave me a weak smile. “Call the NSA.”

Chapter 10

I wasn’t back at the Town Hall before O’Day
emailed me the address. But then, I wasn’t getting back into Town
Hall anytime soon, as Occupied Seattle was well on its way to full
WTO lock down. The Feds were forming skirmishing lines, all clad in
riot gear, as an angry mob taunted them across Westlake Square.

The Feds looked undermanned, and I could see
why. Looking at the mob, I recognized many of my old comrades,
police officers and city workers, toting hunks of concrete and
taunting the riot cops. They weren’t in uniform, but it was
obvious. They were the ringleaders. The Seattle establishment had
turned out for a little street justice.

I was of half a mind to step up to the line
and join right in, but with the Montavez case just about to break
wide open, I had no time to help out. It disgusted me to admit it,
but I needed Constantine and his TAC-30 unit to Special Ops their
way into the address O’Day had just sent me, before the
Rosicrucians figured out that they’d just stolen back an e-reader
with its lowjack broadcasting back to the mother ship.

An official was addressing the crowd through
a megaphone as I pushed forward through the gathered mass of
humanity. People were screaming, brandishing bats and makeshift
clubs. They were ready for a fight, alright. The Feds were
dangerously outnumbered.

I broke through the crowd and advanced on the
Fed’s line. Riot cops yelled from behind gas masks for me to get
back, but I raised my hands, with my badge showing in the right. I
just kept yelling “Constantine” over and over, until the wall of
riot shield parted and let me slip through. A bottle exploded an
inch to my right as I slipped through the Fed’s phalanx. I ducked
as the broken glass sprayed me. Fuckers. Guess I was marked down as
a collaborator now. I was going to have to watch myself.

I found Constantine in his command trailer,
frantically yelling orders to his ops team at their consoles. I’d
only seen the mob in Westlake Square, but from the monitors I could
see he was dealing with similar gatherings in Pioneer, Hing Hay and
Steinbrueck. The masses had the Feds boxed in. No wonder
Constantine looked scared.

“Get a reserve detachment to Yestler and
Fifth, right now!” Constantine bellowed as I climbed into his
trailer. He had his jacket off and his tie loosened. He looked
frazzled.

“You ordered the reserve to Pike and—” a
bearded geek began to dispute.

“Fuck! I don’t care!” Constantine growled.
“Just find me more men! And form a skirmish line at Yestler,
okay?”

“We have movement, east down—” another voice
said.

“They’re coming at Alpha Twenty’s flank!”
Constantine thrust an angry finger at an overhead, thermal map. He
must have had drones in the air, giving him a live feed. “Order
Alpha—” Constantine began. Then decided there wasn’t time. He
ripped the headset off the seated technician and hollered into the
microphone himself. “Alpha Twenty, wheel to your nine! Approaching
hostiles! I repeat—”

But the battle had already begun. The riot
police on Pike were caught off guard as a mass of red blobs on the
thermal screen swarmed over a mass of blue blobs with ID tags.

“Shit!” Constantine threw the headset back at
the shocked ops tech. “Pull twenty men of Westlake to reinforce
Pike. Where’s the ORV?” Constantine turned to look at a tactical
map.

“Tough day?” I said from my dark corner.

Constantine gave me a quick glance and
returned to his map. “I don’t have time for you Fonseca.”

“I’ve got a hot lead on Montavez,” I said,
stepping up next to Constantine and attempting to figure out what
about the map he was so interested in.

“Not now,” Constantine dismissed. Then, to
his Ops, “Move Mobile One to…University! University and Third.”

“Wilco,” the bearded geek said, straightening
his headset on his ears.

“I just need a fire team to breach an
address,” I continued, undeterred.

“I have no spare men right now, Detective,”
Constantine replied with irritation. “Everyone is in the
field.”

“I can see that.” I smiled. The red blobs on
the thermal map seemed to have the upper hand. “But these could be
the guys who have Montavez’s body.”

“It will have to wait,” Constantine said.

“Wait?” I exclaimed. “Wait? These guys took a
big risk coming out of hiding to cover their tracks. They messed
up, and they know it. These are our murderers. We’re talking
minutes here, Special Agent. Once they drop out of sight again,
there’ll be nothing bringing them back up into the daylight. All I
have is an address…” I held up my phone in front of Constantine,
with the address in its screen, “…and a rapidly shirking window of
opportunity.”

Constantine sighed. “I simply can’t spare the
men, Fonseca. I have aggressives only blocks away. If they
overwhelm Command...”

“Well, you’ll have to spare someone,” I said,
returning my phone to my pocket. “Constantine,” I whispered, trying
not to share my concerns with the entire command trailer. “Isn’t
the Montavez murder your whole justification for this? If her
killers get away...are you going to be able to rationalize anything
you’ve done here? To your superiors? To the courts?” Constantine
paused in his frantic attempt to run his defense. I’d hit a nerve.
“Returned back East with nothing to show for all this expense, all
the arrests, all the broken teeth...they’re going to pin all of
this on somebody...but return with Vivian Montavez’s body...return
her to her grieving mother...then all of this is going to be seen
in a very different light, Special Agent. Think about it.”

Constantine straightened to his full height.
He turned to face me as he sucked in his gut. “Alright, we’ll check
it out.”

“Good.” I smiled.

“But just you and me,” Constantine reached
for his jacket. “We’ll keep this quiet. If it’s a dead-end, then
we’ve only wasted an hour.”

“What?” I hedged. He’d missed my point. “But
just the two of us—”

“Come on, Detective.” Constantine didn’t wait
to hear my protests. He was already climbing out of the command
trailer.

“I mean, you have guys for this—”

But Constantine was already gone. I was left
in the dark on the Feds HQ, as agents and Ops tried desperately to
coordinate their defense. The crowds were closing in on Occupied
Seattle.

The wolves were howling at the door.

“Wild Thing! I’ll eat you up!” I could almost
hear the crowd yelling.

Chapter 11

Constantine handed me his heavy, black
handgun. It was larger than any kind of pistol I’d even used. It
was monstrously large in my hand yet felt remarkably light. I
hefted it and tested its sights.

“It’s a centimeter gun,” Constantine
explained as he was digging in the truck of his Charger. We were
three block for the address O’Day had sent me. It was dark and the
streets were empty. Those that weren’t rioting downtown were locked
up tight in their homes. We had the city to ourselves.

“Centimeter?” I raised a curious eyebrow.

“Ten millimeter, caseless ammunition,” he
continued. I turned the gun over looking for the magazine. Where
did the bullets go? Constantine reached out and flipped open a
hatch. “Twenty-two rounds, ablative magazine. Doesn’t violate
assault weapon legislation because technically it doesn’t have a
magazine at all. The bullets are held together by epoxy. The breech
strips off one round at a time.”

“You’re kidding me?” I laughed, poking the
solid block of clear plastic inside the handle of the gun.

“Nope.” Constantine pulled a bulletproof vest
over his suit jacket. When he was armored, he armed himself with a
futuristic looking machine gun. “The centimeter round is an
intermediate-powered cartridge, delivering almost 1.8 kilojoules of
muzzle energy. That’s more than the old .223 Remington. That amount
of firepower allows ammunition uniformity between sidearm and
assault rifle.” He held up the black gun. It also didn’t have a
detachable magazine, just a well to feed in bullets. He picked up a
couple of the over-sized candy bars of a glued bullets and fed each
in turn into the weapon. He cycled the bolt and seated the rifle in
his shoulder.

“You Hot Kids get all the cool toys,” I said,
looking at the black handgun. It was a lot more firepower than my
little Rhino. But I wished I had one of his bulletproof vests.

“We didn’t come to Seattle unprepared,” he
said, starting up the street toward are target address.

I followed. “Not unprepared for a fight but
you didn’t expect the sort of resistance you’re getting downtown,
did you?” I cocked a thumb back toward the city.

A few doors away from the dilapidated house
that O’Day’s lowjack had led us to, Constantine paused to check his
rifle. I tried to wrap my hands comfortably around the hilt of the
handgun, but it felt too large in my grip.

“We’ve already identified the ringleaders,”
Constantine spoke up, breaking the silence. “We know that members
of the old city regime are behind the violence. When we’ve subdued
the protest; they will be dealt with.”

“Dealt with?” I said in disgust. “Do you hear
yourself? First the Progs, then the Genies, now the Seattle old
guard. You’re sure making enemies fast.”

“You’ve got to break some eggs, Fonseca, if
you want to make an omelet.”

“Yeah, but people have to want to eat an
omelet, Special Agent,” I replied.

But Constantine missed my quip. He was
already on his feet scurrying toward the dark, abandoned house. I
trotted to keep up, staying low and silent. It was no time to fool
around. For once, Constantine’s tactical preparedness was perfectly
warranted.

Genies were dangerous when cornered. They
might lull you in with the false pretense of hippie, dopey
acquiescence. But like all addicts, their mood could change on a
dime. One minute, you were dealing with a spaced-out junkie then
next a snarling maniac trying to rip out your throat. And the
Genies we were after, the one’s who’d burned O’Day’s lab and
potentially murdered Montavez, had already show a propensity for
violence. No, I’d stay behind Constantine’s rifle and keep his
centimeter gun leveled. There was no telling what we’d find inside
the Rosicrucian’s flop.

Constantine shimmied up to the right of the
front door and gave me the go signal. I stepped back, put my boot
into the door, and kicked it wide open. Constantine was already
moving, slicing the pie to the right. I followed on his heels, gun
at the low ready, and went left.