Authors: John Shirley
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 77
th
. 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 20
th
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 77
th
...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 77
th
, 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.