The Heist of Hollow London, page 23
“You’re sure?”
“The structure is consistent with a new model, not one from years and years ago. And you can just tell, it’s fresh.”
“Then Kline must have made it. He was going to keep the real one and give you that one.”
“But why demand a share of the money and then give me a fake that has nothing on it? Why do that if he was going to steal it all?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“If I took the fake from his pocket, that means the real one is—”
“Still with him. It must be.”
* * *
They returned to Kline’s body, which still lay where it fell, with no sign it had been disturbed; if someone had ransacked the body you could guarantee they would also have rifled through his suitcase, but the case was also exactly as it had been when they left. The light was failing, so Mia told Arlo to hold a flashlight while she searched all Kline’s pockets and then his case. But she found nothing.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mia said eventually, sitting in the doorway of the grounded copter. “From the way he acted, he was negotiating with a full hand. Or what he thought was a full hand. But he never had the money.”
“Maybe he hid it somewhere?” said Arlo, who was looking through the case and discovering Kline had not packed Arlo’s golf shirt, the bastard.
“But why try to bargain for a larger share of the money if he secretly had it all? No, I know what makes sense”—and here Mia stood, pulled out her pistol and pointed it at Arlo—“is you and Drienne decided to take all the money for yourselves and set up Kline as the fall guy for it.”
“No!” Arlo yelled, standing up and stepping back.
“Yes, this makes lots of sense. You put this fake Coyne down the trash pipe, Drienne holds on to the real one, Kline gets the fake, you come here telling me Drienne’s disappeared and make sure Kline takes the blame.”
“No, that’s not…” Arlo was about to say he didn’t know what she was talking about, but that was what guilty people in dramas said and it always sounded so guilty. But he didn’t know what she was talking about. Instead he said, “If I was going to do that, wouldn’t I have disappeared along with Drienne? Why would I risk confronting you instead of letting Kline come alone?”
Mia’s arm—the one that held the gun—relaxed a little. “Huh.”
“All I ever wanted was my cut and my debt canceled. Mostly the latter, I’m the one who’s been telling everyone to focus on that all along. You said the debt only got canned if we completed the job, but this isn’t completing the job, is it? So why would I do that?”
Mia considered this and let the gun fall slightly to one side. “That’s true. I don’t think you’re screwing me.”
Arlo exhaled with relief.
“Your friend is,” said Mia. “So we’re going looking for her after all.”
34
EASY TO SAY IN RETROSPECT
As Drienne steered the truck train she and Loren had stolen straight through the center of London, she wondered if she’d done the right thing by leaving Arlo behind. Rationally she knew it was better he remained unaware of what she was doing. If he’d known it would have freaked him out, and made him anxious, and then he’d never have been able to lie convincingly to Mia about it. And this way he might get what he wanted even if Drienne didn’t.
Anyway, there’d have been no need to leave Arlo behind if not for Kline. Kline had really fucked this whole thing, and Drienne was going to fucking kill him when she saw him again.
* * *
When Loren had lain inside the cart at the dead-waste yard, listening to someone climbing the ladder, they’d been ready to leap up, surprise them, punch them in the face, and knock them to the ground. After they’d done that they intended to grab Arlo’s sunglasses case and jump out of the cart (ideally landing on the person and injuring them further) before running away. They were winding up to deliver this blow when they rolled over and realized the person leaning over the side of the cart was Kline, just in time to pull their punch.
In retrospect, Loren should have done as they originally intended. Instead they said, “Kline, thank fuck it’s you. Help me out of here.”
Kline didn’t help them out of the cart. “Have you got the Coyne?” he asked.
Loren said, “Yes, it’s—”
Kline cut off this sentence by whipping Loren hard across the head with a small cosh he’d taken from his pocket. Then he delivered a second blow, knocking them unconscious.
* * *
When Loren awoke, they saw Arlo’s sunglasses case still lodged in the junk, right in front of their eyes. Ah, I should grab that, they thought. It’s important. They also realized the cart was moving. It took them a moment to process what this meant, but when they did, they grabbed the case and leapt out of the cart in a panic before it tipped them into the compactor. It was just starting to activate, its mechanisms warming up, as Loren picked themself up off the ground.
It wasn’t hard to fill in what had happened in the interim. Loren looked inside their rucksack and yes, the dummy Coyne they’d printed off earlier that day had gone. Kline had searched the bag, found what he thought was the real Coyne, and taken it. He’d also taken Loren’s slate and used the access privileges he’d granted them to set the cart in motion, then left the scene. The fact he had not stayed to watch them die suggested a degree of squeamishness, or maybe just overconfidence. He’d probably overestimated how long they’d remain unconscious for—you had to hit someone seriously hard to knock them out for more than a few minutes.
Loren made their way to a corner of the yard to get cleaned up. The cosh had struck them on the temple and on the cheekbone, drawing blood, and the wounds were swelling. This was irritating as there were cops everywhere looking for people who had taken part in a riot, and Loren now looked exactly like someone who had taken part in a riot.
The upside was Loren was now free to examine the Coyne, which was what they’d wanted all along. Kline’s betrayal gave them the perfect excuse to disappear for a bit: probably he’d go to the rendezvous, maybe he’d tell the others Loren was dead or he didn’t know what had happened to them, and they’d all catch the overline to NiZCOval. Presumably Kline also had something else planned, probably a play for more money with Loren out of the picture. As he was now carrying a dummy, that might not go too well—but that wasn’t Loren’s problem.
Loren felt confident they could crack the archaic security on the Coyne’s false tray in ten minutes, tops, but they didn’t want to do it while hanging around with stolen goods in a facility swarming with police. They left the yard through the gate and headed round to the platform, where a truck train was waiting. They stepped inside the steerage truck, turned the power on, and within a few minutes had assumed control of the train. They would head out, stop somewhere quiet, take a look at the Coyne and then maybe take the train all the way down—
Fuck. Kline took their slate. Maybe there was something on the train they could adapt to use as an interface …
They looked up and saw Drienne descending the fire escape at the side of the building. There were cops with her, and Loren wondered if she was under arrest. Loren stepped out of the truck to get a better view.
Drienne looked in Loren’s direction, saw them, and sped up her descent. Moments later, she was hurrying down the steps that led to the platform.
Loren quickly formed a plan. They would tell Drienne what had happened with Kline; reassure her they had the real Coyne and Kline had a dummy; borrow Drienne’s slate so they could get to work on lifting the tray; Drienne would then meet the others and travel down with them to NiZCOval. Loren would take the train straight there and be like Surprise, motherfucker when they saw Kline again.
As Drienne approached, Loren saw one of the cops descend the steps, shouting for Drienne to stop and come back. Drienne wasn’t prepared to wait and find out why. Loren stepped back inside the steerage truck, Drienne dashed the last few steps and dived in, and Loren told the truck train to start moving. Its acceleration was slow at first, and the cop had time to reach it and grab a doorframe. As he tried to climb inside, the train jolted into a higher gear, causing him to lose his grip. Loren peered from the window and saw him tumble to the platform.
When Loren put their head back inside, Drienne said, “Thank fuck,” and pulled Loren into an embrace. This surprised Loren, as they weren’t a tactile person and Drienne hadn’t shown much sign of regarding them with fondness. But recent days had bonded them, in an odd way.
* * *
Drienne had her suspicions from the start. It was easy to say that in retrospect, but she really had. She’d been wary of checking out those suspicions while staying at Mia’s apartment in Vancouver, because Mia had access to their activity records. Drienne needed an unregistered terminal and a connection outside of Mia’s range, which was why she’d confided in Loren. At the time Loren was ordering lots of equipment for the job, including slates they were going to register with the crew’s alt-ids, so they bought an extra one and claimed it was an emergency spare. Loren had no issue with Drienne doing this background research, regarding it as due diligence.
Drienne took the spare slate with her on the first day she and Arlo went out to practice with the drone squadrons, and used it to look up the backstory Mia had told them. If it was as significant as Mia claimed, there should be something about it online—and there was. It had indeed been a landmark case, famous in legal circles. As well as academic articles there were documentaries, gameplays, and a twenty-six-part animated series telling the story. The case and its aftermath dominated Mia’s public profile, and you had to dig deep to find anything else about her at all. It must be odd to be famous for something shitty that happened to you so long ago, as if nothing else you did could ever possibly matter.
But the important thing was: every account Drienne found matched Mia’s.
Drienne had to talk to someone about it, but Arlo was so earnest about not rocking the boat with Mia, fully invested in their holder being the real deal. So the following morning, when Loren went out for a run, Drienne casually said she would go too, hoping no one else spontaneously opted to join them. (Nadi was still asleep.) They ran around the park, which was so much farther than Drienne would ever usually try to run, and when she stopped for a rest, this wasn’t just because she wanted to talk to Loren, she needed to stop before she collapsed and died.
“Everything Mia told us seems true,” Drienne said.
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” said Loren.
“Suppose so.”
“Good idea to check it out, though. We should know the whole story. No nasty surprises later.”
Drienne nodded. “I still think something’s not right.”
“What’s that?”
“I said I still think something’s not right.”
“I heard you, I meant what d’you think’s not right?”
“I don’t know. The money … I don’t quite buy this thing about Samson not being able to find anyone who could launder it.”
“Probably didn’t want to tell anyone else about the money. He’d already told Mia and didn’t want more people to know.”
“But would he really leave it there all these years, halfway across the world?”
“Mia did say it was a retirement plan, and that it was difficult to move a Coyne.”
“Yeah, but if I had retirement savings…”
Loren laughed shortly.
“I know, man,” Drienne continued, “good joke. But if I did, I’d find a way to move them somewhere I could see them. There must be a way. I wouldn’t trust it to still be there all those years later.”
“You would, I would. But nats think differently about this stuff. Xecs especially. And there could be all kinds of”—Loren shrugged—“factors here we don’t know about.”
“Exactly, yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
“But it doesn’t mean there’s something Mia isn’t telling us. Maybe she doesn’t know either.”
“But if she’s so smart—like, she’s smarter than me, right? So if I’m asking these questions, why isn’t she?”
“She probably has and she couldn’t find the answers, so didn’t want to confuse us with a bunch of extra information.”
This seemed fair, and Drienne was tired of looking for holes in the story, so she dropped it and they finished their run at a pace Loren clearly found frustrating.
* * *
It was later, in London, that Loren came to Drienne at the NiZCOval apartment and said they needed to talk. Drienne considered bringing Arlo into it at this point, mostly because she found it hard to exclude him. She’d never kept anything from him before and their habitual closeness made it difficult to do so now. But she still felt it was in his best interest not to involve him just yet: if Mia found out they were poking into her background, Drienne didn’t want to get Arlo in trouble and risk him not getting his freedom and his share of the loot. He could stay clean. He was literally getting clean in the shower when Loren arrived, so it was easy for Drienne to slip out of the apartment and not tell him where she’d gone.
Drienne and Loren bought chilled soup and ate it sitting in the plaza that had been built next to the old pavilion, and Loren explained. In the course of learning about Kentish Cyc and infiltrating its systems, Loren had come across huge chunks of leaked Oakseed data. Usually, Oakseed’s bots would have tracked and scrubbed stuff like this, but the bots had been shut down so all this data was just swimming around online, being replicated and chewed through. There was an insane amount of it, more than a human brain could process in a thousand lifetimes, but Loren was skilled at fishing and the conversation with Drienne back in Vancouver had stuck with them. The support spent much of their downtime in London fishing for data about Mia, figuring there was bound to be stuff Oakseed knew about her that had never been made public.
“And what did you find out?” Drienne asked.
“A lot,” said Loren. “Well, too much and not enough—I couldn’t track down her personnel file, maybe she’s got her own bots scrubbing that stuff. What I found was mostly activity tracking, correspondence and so on, and I filtered it and, well, headline: Mia never worked at Kentish Cyc.”
“What?”
“Yep.”
“But the articles about the court case mentioned it. That was, like, her humble beginnings.”
“I reckon those were inserts.”
“You mean she changed the story—”
“In case we looked it up, yeah.”
“Is that hard to do? Insert details into reports? It seems like that should be hard to do.”
“They’re designed to update with fresh data, so if you could change a couple of key sources that are considered reliable, and then trigger an update, you could change a lot of stuff. Especially if you made it seem like a detail in the original story was wrong, and tricked the system into accepting your new info as the correction.”
“But how did you work this out without her employee record?”
“Oh simple—I crunched all her activity patterns into a timeline, and there’s just no gaps, no time when she could have worked there. I can account for every day until she quit.”
Drienne absorbed this. “Could be she got the information about the Coyne from someone else and now she’s cutting them out of the operation and doesn’t want us to know. So she’s making out this is personal experience when it’s actually secondhand.”
“But if someone else knows about this, why aren’t they trying to get the money?”
“Maybe they will try to get it. Could mean trouble for us.”
“Mia’s planned this in detail, it’s obviously important to her we succeed, yeah?” said Loren, gesturing with the bread roll they’d bought to go with the soup. (It was stale, and gesturing was the best use for it.) “So if there’s a possibility some other prick might swoop in and snatch it, she’d tell us so we could be prepared. So I don’t think it’s that.”
“Okay. What if Mia got this info from someone else, and they’re dead?”
“Why not just tell us that? And you were the one who thought something was off about Mia.”
“I know, I’m just trying to cover all the possibilities instead of jumping to conclusions.”
“Well, same. But do you think Mia would go to the effort of inserting this detail into a bunch of records because it was simpler than telling us the truth?”
Drienne considered this. “No. I don’t. But I don’t know what is going on.” She sighed. “Look, maybe it’ll be fine. If we bring back the Coyne like she told us to … I mean, just because she lied to us doesn’t automatically mean she won’t give us our cut or can our debts.”
“No. No, that’s true.”
“I just wish I could work out why she lied.”
“Me too.”
After this uneasy, inconclusive discussion they cheered themselves up by going to the bar in the old pavilion and ordering cocktails, and it was there that Arlo found them.
* * *
While the operation ramped up, Loren continued to spend their downtime trawling Oakseed’s data on Mia, looking into the details of the case between them and what had happened with Mia’s creations after it was over. Loren made prompts that targeted inconsistencies and oddities, and searched for colleagues Mia had a lot of contact with, in case that told them anything.
Around lunchtime on the day of the operation, while Loren was killing time waiting to take the Lost Weekend down to Bloomsbury, they found it.
Oakseed had made a number of offers to Mia after the case was finally settled, hoping to lure her back to the company—not so much because they wanted her, but because they wanted the publicity such a climbdown would provide. It would create a powerful sense the company couldn’t be beaten, and also make them look generous, to an extent. Mia had refused them all. A brief internal exchange took place six years after Mia lost the case, noting she had suffered severe brain damage. She’d tried to erase areas of her memory with an experimental technique, hoping to remove those parts of herself Oakseed had laid claim to. Had this worked, she planned to reopen the case and establish ownership of her personality, but it had gone badly wrong, rendering her barely capable of dressing and feeding herself.
