A Motive with a Universal Adapter 02

"K-Jon," I returned his greeting with a nod, ignoring his bait and trying to keep my voice as cold as possible. "Don't you have work to do? We're not paying you to shoot B-roll."

"B-roll? You're losing your touch, Abbs. Carl's little tuck-roll-double-kill stunt is going to anchor tomorrow's Midnight Mayhem. You got me the reverse angle on it, right?"

Of course I did. I shot the whole chase on a mini-cam mounted to the front of the hotrod, and since Carl was facing my camera, it was K-Jon who had the reverse angle. But I wasn't about to give him the pleasure of being right-ish.

"I've got bigger things to worry about than your little carnage clip show."

"Oh yeah? Are you and the Beauty Queen Bodyguard over there shooting another sell-out piece for ICS?"

"You saw that?" I could feel my face flush, and I hated myself for it.

"I did," he answered, stepping down out of the transport. He had that old look in his eyes. "It was good... Too good for ICS."

I knew he was manipulating me, but I went all mushy inside anyway. I stopped myself from giggling like a schoolgirl, but I didn't have a response. Ritz saved me again.

"Yeah, well they paid for it," she called, striding over. "You come up with the euro, you can have the next one."

"I wouldn't want to deprive you of another chance to make fuck-me eyes at that hack, Dan Ryder," K-Jon shot back, quick as ever.

"Dan never had to give a weather report laying on the floor because his camera mount slipped," she retorted, which was only about the worst thing she could have possibly said.

K-Jon turned back to me. "You still watch me," he declared with a smug smile drawn across his face.

I was totally busted, but I'd managed to recover a little of my composure.

"God, you are such an ass," I rolled my eyes. "Just get me the damn watermarks."

"Sure thing, Abbs," he said with a wink and that charming smile, then turned to climb back into the Herkimer. "What's on these chips anyway?"

"Wouldn't you like to know."

"I would, yeah... That's why I asked."

I shouldn't have let him goad me. I should have just told him it was none of his business, but there was a part of me that wanted to rub his nose in the fact that I had this story and he didn't. There was another part that still wanted him to be proud of me. A third part of me took satisfaction in knowing something K-Jon didn't, but it lost out to the other two.

"The vids are proof that Militech won their military privatization contracts through blackmail," I boasted as I followed him into the Herkimer. "Is that story big enough for ya?"

"Whoa." He sat back on the bench seat and I took some pride in the astonished expression on his face. "So the four crease-marks out there were Militech?"

"Yep. They've been after me for almost two weeks now."

"You're playing in the big leagues here, Abbs. Who do you have lined up that's brave enough to broadcast this? Not ICS?"

"I'll send it out to all the networks simultaneously," I told him confidently. "They'll all have to air it, or risk getting scooped."

"Abby," K-Jon shook his head and looked back at me with sympathy. "That trick only works for a breaking story... This... This is old news. I mean, yeah this is a huge scandal that you've unearthed, but the networks are going to fact-check this story before they air it. That gives Militech plenty of time to kill it."

"Get the story first, then figure out how to sell it," I retorted. "You taught me that."

"Yeah, but I have my own transmitter. I'm my own buyer."

He always did this, and I should have known he'd do it again. He always took my ideas, my plans, my dreams and he shot them full of holes until I lost confidence in them. Not this time.

"Whatever. Just get me the watermarks."

K-Jon sighed and went back to his work. He had a digital video player hooked up to a vid-screen with some sort of tuner in between. A carrying case lay open on the bench seat and Savage Joe's vid-chips had been divided into two piles on either side of the case, one with only three chips in it. K-Jon picked up a clipboard, ejected the last chip from the player, and added it to the smaller pile.

"Hey, can I see how you do that?" Owl leaned through the door to the driver's cab to ask. The lenses of his goggles glimmered pale green in the dark and I suddenly realized that the whole reason I'd been drawn into a conversation with my ex was because I wanted to check on Owl.

"Yeah, sure man. Come on back."

"Hi, Owl!" I managed to greet him, hastily combing my fingers through my hair and straightening my skirt. "Thanks for your help tonight. I would have called myself, but it was safer for Carl to set things up. I hope you don't mind. I know it was more than just a simple taxi job, but we couldn't have done it without you... I just wanted to say thanks."

"Okay, cool." He smiled at me as he stooped back into the passenger compartment, holding either side of the door frame for balance. The flash of chrome on his right side caught my eye.

"Hey, you got your new arm installed!"

"Yeah," he confirmed, admiring his right arm as he flexed and stretched it. "I'm still on antibiotics from the surgery, and the doc says no heavy lifting for another week, but I just had to jack in my vehicle link to drive, so I think that's probably okay."

"Yeah, I'm sure that's fine," I agreed, running my fingers along the cool steel of his exposed bicep. "It looks good on you. Better than it did on the last guy."

"Cool. Thanks." And then he turned his attention to K-Jon. "Is that a multi-channel video equalizer you've got hooked up there?"

I tried to follow along. When they started talking about saturation ratios I left them to it, and climbed out of the Herkimer. Carl was telling Ritz that K-Jon could work faster on a stable surface than he could on the move.

"I don't like sitting still out in the open like this," she countered. "Hey Rhoades, how's it going back there?"

"I don't know. I don't speak techno-babble," I grumped, hopping down to the pavement. Crossing my arms and leaning back against the steel bumper with a huff, I added "Men!"

"Yeah, we've all been there," Ritz commiserated.

"I hear ya, sister... Boys and their toys." Carl chimed in shaking his head. When Ritz and I both turned to glare up at him, he looked innocently puckish. "...What?"

It took K-Jon most of an hour to read all the model and serial numbers embedded in the videos. I paid him and I gave him the chase video I'd shot. I'm not proud of it, but I still get a thrill when I see my camera work on TV. Even after we broke up, I kept sending KJON anonymous clips for Midnight Mayhem. The last one was the gun-cam footage of Ritz shooting down that Arasaka AV.

Owl and Carl dropped K-Jon back at his studio while Ritz and I took his handwritten list back to The Boxes. I planned on spending the rest of the night sorting the data to see if there were any patterns to be gleaned. It only took a minute to notice duplicate serial numbers and after a few minutes of sorting them I discovered there were only six different cameras used to film the fifty-seven blackmail vids. Next, I wanted to graph out a timeline for each.

By this point it was pretty routine for me to fall asleep in the den, leaving the workout mat to Ritz and Carl for whatever they wanted to do on it. I was snuggled up on the loveseat with my notes and my graphs when Carl got home with Owl in tow.

"Hope you don't mind. I invited Owl for the victory celebration." Mount Carl held up a six pack of beer cans in his huge hand.

"It's not a victory yet, Carl," I objected. "We only have one more piece of the puzzle. We still don't have the whole story, much less proof we can go on the air with, or even a network who'll broadcast it... Hi, Owl."

"Hi Abby."

"Hey, c'mon... 'Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground,'" Carl quoted. "Henry David Thoreau."

"...Did he really say that?"

"Pretty sure he meant it literally, but it still applies. C'mon, grab a beer and celebrate a small victory."

So I set my notes aside and I joined them all in the kitchen. I cracked open a beer and raised it in a toast with the others.

"Here's to being one step closer," Carl toasted, and we all bumped our cans together with a cheer.

"Here's to four less goons on our trail," Ritz added and we cheered and drank again.

Then we sat around the kitchen talking, mostly catching up with Owl about what had happened at the warehouse since Ritz quit. With some prodding, he told us how pissed off her boss Jayden was, which made Ritz happy. He told us how a couple of suits had come around last week asking questions about us. He told them everything he knew, which wasn't much, because he didn't know not to.

Eventually the talk turned to the data K-Jon had pulled out of the watermarks, and our next step. I said we'd have to go back to the library.

"Nope! I'm out," Ritz announced, and drained the last of her beer. "G'night, brainiacs. Wake me up when it's time to guard the door."

Ritz went to bed and I explained to Owl and Carl how we'd have to go back to the library and look up each model number to find out which company manufactured each camera. Then we'd probably need a netrunner to trace the serial numbers in each companies' data fortress to learn who each cyber-optic camera had been sold to. Hopefully, they were direct sales to Militech. If not, we'd have to figure out how each buyer was connected.

Neither of them had much confidence in my plan. They didn't think the kind of records we needed would be available at a public library.

"It's the kind of thing they look up for you in a manufacturer's catalog when you go to a store to special order a part," Owl explained, looking over my shoulder at K-Jon's clipboard.

"It's not like they keep those catalogs indexed in periodicals," Carl added, opening the last can of beer.

"The only place you might find back issues this old is a repair shop. But look here..." Owl pointed at the clipboard. "These model numbers here all end with an 'X'. That usually stands for 'experimental', so this model is probably an unlisted prototype. In fact..." he studied the clipboard for a moment. "Yep, these two are both the same model with different serial numbers."

It tracked with our theory that the earliest recordings pre-dated commercial availability of cyber-optic cameras. But it was going to make it harder than I expected to identify the manufacturers.

"If you know a netrunner though, they might be able to find it somewhere," Owl continued.

"Yeah, but we have to tell a netrunner where to look first," I explained, rubbing my eyes. It was late, I needed a stim tab, and I was getting frustrated. "They can't just start breaking into data fortresses at random."

"Okay cool, but they could search a BBS pretty easily."

My ears perked up.

"What's a BBS?"

"A Bulletin Board System. It's like a cross between a library and a data terminal's classified ads, except in net space. A lot of netrunners are real data hoarders and they archive some pretty esoteric stuff in BBSes. I'm sure there's one dedicated to cyberware and there's probably one for cameras."

It turned out that Owl knew several netrunners. He'd done work for them customizing their decks and their plugs—building cellular modems into cyber-limbs, wiring quick-releases and kill-switches, that sort of thing. He had even hitchhiked into net space with them a few times.

Apparently there was a lot more to netrunning than just breaking into corporate data fortresses, and Owl was happy to tell us all about it. Mount Carl eventually got bored with Owl's techno-babble and followed Ritz to bed.

When he was explaining something so that you could actually understand it, I found Owl to be a passionate and eloquent instructor. He taught me things about netrunning that I had never even thought to ask Whistler. He made net space sound like someplace I might even want to visit someday.

But Owl couldn't take me there. He understood the technology and the hardware, but running the sophisticated software took training and practice he'd never found the time for.

Much to Ritz's relief, the library was not the next step. The next step was to find a netrunner. When I dialed up Whistler from a public data-term, a phone company recording told me the number was no longer in service. He'd been serious about erasing his existence.

Owl offered to introduce me to one of his netrunner acquaintances, but he couldn't vouch for their integrity. Whoever we found would surely notice that we were investigating Militech, and it would probably occur to them that Militech would pay well for the tip off. The last thing we needed was a traitor selling us out surreptitiously in net space.

I really, really wanted Whistler back on the team, but I couldn't figure out how to contact him without the risk of Militech intercepting it.

"How did you hook up with Whistler in the first place?" Ritz asked.

"I took out a classified ad looking for a netrunner, but I was broke, so I offered a home cooked Italian meal in exchange. Whistler answered the ad, but he had some other ideas about payment."

"Wait, you can cook?" Carl interrupted, as if that was the point of the anecdote.

"My grandmother was Italian. Of course I can cook."

"You let me keep reheating frozen scop packs every night when your Italian grandmother taught you how to cook?" he bellowed in mock indignation. "When do I get my home cooked Italian meal?"

"Okay, okay!" I tried to placate the big man. "I owe you a--"

"Two!"

"--Many, many home cooked meals," I promised. "I'm sorry Carl, I have been so focused on this story it didn't occur to me to do the cooking. Besides, I thought you and Ritz had... an arrangement."

"Well, yeah," he grinned sheepishly. "But if I had known I could choose between sex and calamari--"

"No calamari!" Ritz and I both broke in together. Mount Carl wisely dropped the subject, but I don't think Ritz ever let him forget it.

We came to the obvious conclusion that I should post another classified ad that no one but Whistler would understand. I debated posting it in Italian, but there can't be that many Italian netrunners out there and I was afraid that might draw the attention of anyone who had already connected me to Whistler.

The tricky part was composing the ad. I tried to remember the jobs he'd done for me in the past, the Japanese cartoon porn I'd dubbed for him, and the conversations we'd had that Militech wouldn't have been listening in on.

Once I was satisfied that I had the best message I could come up with, I paid ten cents a word to post it for a week in the classifieds on a public data-term.

---

Netrunner wanted. I need the soothing touch of your tentacles. This is no taxi corp data shed but it's not Nagumo the Overfiend either. Call me like it was our first time. Just tell me when. Hurry before I lose my voice.

---

"What does 'Call me like it was our first time' mean?" Ritz asked, reading over my shoulder.

"...You're not going to like it."

"...Damn it... tell me."

"I didn't have a cell phone yet, and I couldn't even afford my own phone line. So I had Whistler call me on the data-term in the Peach Tree lobby."

"No." Ritz shook her head. "No, we have to assume they're watching the building. It's too dangerous."

"Owl or I can go," Carl suggested.

"We have to assume they'll recognize either of you by now," Ritz pointed out.

"That won't work anyway. Whistler will want to hear my voice on the other end of the line. If he doesn't, we'll lose him and we won't get him back again... It has to be me."

Waiting for Whistler's response was maddening. I was almost ready to start going to repair shops and asking to see their old catalogs in a quixotic attempt to stumble over our model numbers. But even if I did, we'd need a netrunner eventually anyway.

Just sitting in The Boxes was the worst, and I used any excuse I could to get into the more developed parts of the city and check data-terms for replies to my ad. At first there were a few asking what "our first time" meant, or pedantically explaining the right way to hire a netrunner. After a couple of days even those dried up.

At least cooking kept me busy for a couple of hours each day. There was a market in Little Italy that carried reasonable scop facsimiles of fresh ingredients.

My marinara from scop might not be as good as my grandmother's from real tomatoes, but when the price of real food skyrocketed after the Bio-phage, even she bowed to the inevitability of cooking with processed algae protein. She helped me modify her recipes accordingly before she left us.

We came up with a plan B while we waited. Owl set up a meeting with the netrunner he considered to be the most reliable. I was determined to give Whistler every opportunity though, so on the way to meet her, we stopped at a data terminal. I opened the ad almost exactly a week after it was posted. Ritz and I watched the data-term clock tick down the seconds until the ad would be deleted and my hope of finding Whistler would vanish into the ether forever.

With exactly ten seconds left, a new response popped up and my heart skipped a beat.

But there were no words. It was just a string of numbers and dashes and colons with a Z at the end.

"What does that mean!" I yelled at the data term and pounded on the screen with my fists. "What the hell does that mean?"

Ritz had been standing guard, watching my back. My outburst prompted her to turn and look at the screen.

"It's Zulu time," she said flatly. "Greenwich Mean Time, back when that meant something. Tomorrow at 11:59 PM."

And then my ad and all the replies blinked out of existence forever.

It took more time to come up with a plan than it did to actually get me in and out of Peach Tree. Given how brazen Militech had been in attacking us in my apartment, we had to assume the worst. We had to assume that even after three weeks they still had people outside watching the entrances, and inside watching the lobby and my floor. They probably also had a netrunner set an alert to ping off my keycard, just in case.

Maybe they didn't but we had to assume they did, and we went around and around until we had a plan that satisfied Ritz.

"I still don't like it, but it's the best we're going to get," she conceded before sending Owl and I into the lion's den.

Without his signature goggles, Owl didn't really look like Owl. He didn't really look like much of anybody, which made him the perfect blank canvas. When you put him in a generic work uniform from any uniform supply company, and give him a big carton on a hand truck, Owl looks like any other delivery guy with a package addressed to the twenty-fourth floor.

Once he had wheeled the package into the freight elevator, I climbed out of it.

If you put me in the right dress with the right padding underneath and the right cardigan over top, I look about twenty years older. Add a wig and the most comfortable-but-god-awful-looking shoes I've ever worn, and I can pass for Mrs. Giordano from across the hall.

Owl left the empty box next to the garbage up in the service corridor on twenty-four, waited five minutes, and then called the freight elevator to take him back down. I took Express-Two down to the lobby at 11:50PM, made my way into the data-term booth, and pulled the door closed behind me.

I spent a couple of minutes idly browsing the news feed until the incoming call line rang.

"Ciao, caro," I answered in Italian. "It's me."

The call cut off. The screen went dark.

"Whistler? Are you there?"

At the bottom of the blank screen, a phone number appeared, green numbers on the black background. With a thought I recorded what I saw. I hoped I'd been quick enough because a second later the TeleData, Inc. logo filled the screen and a message underneath read "Terminal Rebooting: Please Stand By".