Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 21
Lekan, if he was pressed to admit it, would say he was not likely to miss Lydia al-Shammar much as a person. She had been forced into Global Sandstorm work in the same way that millions of children had been pushed into the business of their parents, and like so many of them she had shown scant enthusiasm for it, doing little actual work while happily spending the token salary that came with her job. While the income from the oil pipeline left a fair amount of room for waste in Global Sandstorm, Lekan had no desire to see the company become flabby.
Though Lekan might not have put much value on Lydia as a person, as a symbol she was of a fair amount of importance to the Yoruba tribe, and so the run that was unfolding in the city below him was devised as a desperate attempt to show how effective he could be. The main purpose had been to confirm that the thing the Igbos had been bragging about had, in fact, happened. If Lekan believed every rumor about a prominent Yoruba falling to the Igbo, he would have believed that a third of the tribe had been wiped out by now, and he himself had been killed a half-dozen times. So naturally confirmation was necessary, but when he put feelers out to learn how such confirmation may be obtained, he discovered it would be complicated indeed, as it seemed that the Igbo had not been gentle with Lydia’s corpse. The operation had required considerable planning, and yet, despite its complications, it was working well, even despite the sad destruction of the runners’ boat hours ago. Lekan had been hesitant to order it, knowing it would make the mission take significantly longer, but there were still things that needed to happen to keep all the plates Lekan had in motion spinning, and that would not have happened without the foot trip across the bridge.
He had not, of course, counted on that wave, whose origins were unclear. Lekan had his suspicions about it, but whoever had generated it had started it far enough offshore that the astral signatures of the magic involved were far distant. Those signatures would likely linger for a time, though, so if Lekan had a deep and abiding interest in just who it was that was making his work more difficult, he could look into it. As it turned out, the wave had not resulted in any losses of anything besides time, and at this point things are going so well that he is inclined to just let it go. He normally did not let people who crossed him go unpunished, but there was only so much vengeance he could dish out in a given time.
There is a blinking light, a soothing light blue, in the right of Lekan’s vision. He allows it to grow into its own window so he may read the message he has just been sent.
Lekan nods to himself. It is not unexpected—the runners had lost one of their own, and so they were going to throw a bit of a tantrum about it. He knows the abilities of the decker he had hired, and he was quite confident that she was capable of hiding from electronic surveillance if she felt like it. She had done remarkably well with the tail he had put on her earlier in the day—he knows that most of the hackers he has on his own staff wouldn’t have detected it, much less made some tentative stabs at identifying its source. So, if she had done that—and she had—then it was quite possible for her to hide her group if that is what she wanted.
But you can only hide those parts of you that you know to be exposed. Olabode Lekan has a fair number of children, and he visits them when he can, and he enjoys making them laugh. He has watched many children grow up, and there are newer children of his who are still young, and the common element he has noticed is that all of them enjoy hiding. They will pull a blanket or pillow over themselves and wait for this man who has just introduced himself as their father to find them. They believe they have made the task difficult, because they have covered their eyes, so to themselves, they have vanished. But there are invariably legs or feet sticking out, since they have not yet grown fully aware of their feet and do not think to hide them.
So it is with the now-angry runners out there. There are some parts of them that they will not hide because they are not aware of them.
Lekan sends a message in reply.
The follow-up message to his is nearly instantaneous.
The wonderful thing about Mohammed International Airport, Lekan thinks, is that it only looks out of control. That is not to say that the chaos isn’t genuine—it is. There is no strong, overriding authority, and so there is a certain ebb and flow of activity that comes when no one is in charge. The beauty of it is, the lack of central authority leads to a chaotic surface, and that appearance leads visitors to believe that surely nothing of consequence is happening there other than the continuing struggles for power.
That impression would be wrong. Lekan, and others in the area as well, have small networks of people who know how to work smoothly amid the airport chaos, and make the things happen that need to happen.
When the two oyibos arrived, they were greeted by the customary bedlam of the airport, and they, like so many others before them, focused solely on navigating the wilds of the place, hoping only to get out with their belongings intact. When they entered into negotiations with an ork with a gun, they were focused on saying the right things, getting a bribe down, and getting out. Other things, such a tiny drone crawling lightly up their leg and injecting even tinier stealth RFID tags into their ankles, were ignored. If they felt anything, they probably attributed it to the insects that took shelter in the airport’s shaded areas.
The tags had remained inert bits of electronics that were quite hard to detect, especially to people who did not know to look for them. Now that the runners believed that they were safe under the shelter of whatever security umbrella Groovetooth had erected, the tags could be activated and used to keep an eye on them.
There was another softly blinking blue light. Lekan sighs. He works hard to be a hands-off leader, the kind of person who delegates responsibility, and then lets his people do whatever it is he has asked them to do. But he has found this to be difficult when his people refuse to operate on their own.
He looks at the new message.
Lekan finds the vagueness of the request to be an extreme irritant. He sends back a simple word.
The reply is rapid.
Lekan rolls his eyes. Technology can evolve as fast as the techs of the world can push it forward, but it will always be hindered by those people who cannot, for whatever reason, find it within themselves to use it to its full potential. He fires off another message.
He realizes, as he sends the message, that his wording about buttons is even more antiquated than the attitude he is fighting, but the message is sent, so it is too late. But the words will get the point across, which is enough.
There is no return message. The people with whom he is communicating know an order when they see it, and they know orders are to be obeyed. A new AR window opens up in front of Lekan, and he sees what it is that his technical people want him to see.
He observes. Then he sends them a message.
By the time he has arrived in the situation room, things have become worse. The room is in chaos, which is rather underwhelming because what Lekan calls his situation room is only two people with an array of electronics. There is not an oversize map, or a giant video screen, or anything that the old movies Lekan has seen has led him to believe should be in a proper situation room. But there is a considerable amount of gear, and that gear does a fine job in presenting information about a variety of situations, which in the end is all that a situation room need do.
Max Baer, born Maxwell Baer Prohaska, is running the situation room today, an efficient man who had arrived in Lagos many years ago from Russia while running from the Vory. Baer had made several hopeful inquiries in the intervening years, but he still had not reached the point where he believed it was safe for him to return to the motherland. He had a brown mustache that overflowed the corners of his mouth and ran down his chin, the two ends spreading away from each other as they approached his jaw. The mustache makes him look like he is always frowning. Also making him look that way is the fact that he is always frowning.
Baer does not say anything when Lekan walks in. He stands straight, looks at Lekan, and waits. It is very possible that Baer believes that anything he says at this moment will be met with a wrathful response, and it is very possible that he is completely correct. And so he is probably acting wisely, but that does not reduce Lekan’s annoyance at the whole situation.
“Baer!” he snaps. “What the hell!”
Baer points, though it is unclear to what it is he is pointing. “There are more of them,” he says.
“I can see that!” Lekan snaps. When he first looked at the AR link sent by Baer, it showed that the two RFID signals marking the oyibos’ location had been joined by two identical signals approximately two kilometers east of the first ones. Then, as Lekan was walking to the situation room, three more sets of signals had appeared. That meant that at the moment, it looked as if there were five sets of the oyibos planted at various locations on Lagos Island. “How did they detect those tags?”
Baer says nothing and only scowls. Or perhaps he does not scowl, and it is only his mustache forming the expression for him.
Lekan’s mind moves rapidly. “Perhaps they detected the signals once the tags were activated,” he says. “Then they worked quickly to mirror them, send out these doubles and triples and so forth.” As he speaks, another set of signals shows up in the AR window. There are now, according to the window, six sets of oyibos. “That would mean that the first set of signals, the ones here, are the real ones.” Unlike Baer, he does not physically point at anything, but rather calls up an arrow in the AR window that points to the relevant set of signals. A similar arrow should be appearing in Baer’s display.
“Perhaps they are still coming to deliver the packages,” Baer says. “The multiple signals are only meant to confuse us about the time of their arrival.” A seventh set of oyibos has appeared.
“Why not just hide them, then? If they know the signals are there, just squelch them? No, they multiplied them for a reason.” Lekan rubs his generous chin, and his jowls wobble lightly. “They want us to come after them.”
“Then we probably shouldn’t,” Baer says.
Lekan jerks his head sharply. “Because we are scared of them? Never! They have what we want. They are waiting for us. Nothing they do to us is more powerful than what we can—what we will—do to them. We can spare seven”—he looks at the screen—“eight teams to chase after some ghosts and find which ones are real. Then we can finish the job.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Is this part of being a professional?” X-Prime asks. He is sitting cross-legged, leaning back against a hard wall.
The room is dark, with only a hint of natural light edging its way past a closed door. Somewhere nearby, plastic sheeting is rustling in the wind, but whatever breeze is moving the plastic is not having any sort of impact on the dark room. The air is still, it is humid, and there is occasionally the sound of water dropping on concrete. That may be drops of sweat rolling to the floor.
“Yes,” Cayman says. “Everything I do is part of being a professional.”
“How convenient for you.”
They sit quietly. Cayman thinks of many things—especially the many things that can go wrong. There will be things going wrong. How could there not be? It was supposed to be a boat ride, a simple twelve-kilometer boat ride, then a small drive through a decent part of town, then pay day. Instead, there had been the gangs and the ammits and the wave and Tamanous on skates, and all of that happened before Akuchi had been killed. It would be unreasonable to believe that everything would now be fixed.
But there is a difference, one thing that Cayman hoped would make what was happening now different from everything happened before. He is following his own script.
Eventually, as Cayman knew would be the case, the silence becomes too much for X-Prime, and he speaks.
“We have chips in our ankles.”
“Yes,” Cayman says.
“I’ve got implants. You’ve got implants. But they’re sitting there, not bothering me, but my ankle feels like it’s terribly itchy, and I think that if I started scratching it I’d scratch it bloody until the implant was gone. Why is that?”
“There’s a lot of difference between the foreign object you invite into yourself and the one that’s thrust upon you.”
“Yeah. Makes me feel like I’ve been violated,” X-Prime says. “Maybe I should talk to Agbele Oku about this.”
“Do that,” Cayman says. “I’m sure having a little chip in your ankle gives you a whole new insight into the female psyche. She’ll be thrilled to talk about it with you.”
That leads to another period of silence. Again, when the time has arrived for the silence to end, it is X-Prime who ends it.
“Okay, let’s say we’re being professional. That the things we’re doing are the things we have to be doing, and are the kind of things that will make people think well of us and want to hire us.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Cayman says. “It’s not just about getting hired. It’s about getting hired by people who will be reluctant to screw with us.”
“That’s a good thing,” X-Prime says. He shifts, and there is a brief shower of sweat on the floor. “But are we being …”
“What?”
“Are we being a little too theatrical? Is everything we’re doing necessary?”
Cayman leans his head back quickly, accidentally hitting the wall much harder than he intended with the back of his skull. It makes a dull thud, and he is very hopeful that it is not noticed by X-Prime.
“There’s four things in life we do that are necessary,” he says. “Eat, drink, breathe, shit. The rest is just…different degrees of theatrics.”
X-Prime is silent for a moment. Then he speaks.
“I’m not sure if that’s cynical or…kind of fun.”
“Why can’t it be both?”
“Okay,” X-Prime says.
There is quiet again, but Cayman feels he has not quite said everything that needs to be said, so he speaks again.
“There’s a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. What Lekan did—if he’s the one doing it—made it so we have to respond. And do it right.”
X-Prime does not have a response to this, and they are left again with the sound of plastic sheeting and dripping sweat.
Olabode Lekan spent as much time as he could stand in the situation room, then he moved the operation upstairs to his larger office once Baer had assured him that the information he wanted could get to him there quickly and securely. They had to leave someone behind to man the machines, but that person was not Lekan—rather, it was a person who was accustomed to spending large portions of his life in that room, and so should not be bothered staying there. That person was left behind, and Lekan is now in a spot where he belongs. There is no point, he believes, to constructing castles in the air if you never spend time in the wonders you have made for yourself.
He has told the eight teams spreading out across Lagos Island to proceed carefully. The eight sets of RFID tags displayed on his AR map have not moved since the moment they appeared. He knows that the runners know about the tags, and they must know that he has seen them. So, they know that people are coming for them, and they are waiting. That means that the real oyibos, wherever they are, are prepared.
At some point, Lekan has grown so impatient for progress that he has zoomed in on a particular team, putting the map on a scale in which one block equals one meter, so he can see how they are moving. The image of progress brings him some comfort, but not as much comfort as the words he longs to hear: “We have the packages.”
He switches back and forth, from one team to another, waiting to see which one will be the first to its destination, and then he settles on a squad moving into the twelfth floor of an office building that is eight blocks away. He nods to Baer, and due to the fact that Baer has long experience interpreting Lekan’s orders, Baer correctly understands that this means Lekan would like to listen in on this team’s communications.
“—are sealed. Elevators are shut down,” one of the team members says. “If they move anywhere, they’re moving up.”
“Repeating one more time—there is to be no weapons fire until we have conclusively identified the presence or absence of one of the packages,” another voice, one that Lekan recognizes as Olaniyi Adenoke, a man competent enough to have been labeled as a captain by Lekan, even though Lekan is technically not a military commander, and does not have the ability to give out ranks. But really, he has men with guns to whom he gives orders, and is that not enough to make him a military commander? Can he not then give out ranks as he sees fit?
The other members of the squadron indicate that they have heard and understood this order, and Captain Adenoke gives the order to proceed forward. Lekan watches them, sees their black icons creep toward the red icons of the oyibos. He listens carefully for gunfire, but he knows that a trooper who is firing his weapon is not likely to be activating his comm at the same time, so he will not receive any further information about the situation until one of the squadron members deigns to give it to him.
