Fontainebleau Hotel — Miami, Florida — August 21, 2011, 10:32 AM
“…and I do believe that you have lost again, Mister Donnelly.” Björn Aaberg grinned as he raked in the pile of money owed to him by his opponent, who just so happened to be Texas oilman Richard Donnelly---aka the twentienth most valuable man on Planet Earth at that moment. “You’re just lucky that my gin rummy game is absolute crap,” Donnelly grunted, shaking his head. “If you’d have had the common decency to chose Texas Hold ‘Em---“
Aaberg laughed good-naturedly. “Come, come, Mister Donnelly,” he assured the other man, “this is nothing more than a friendly game of cards. Of course, if you truly wish to, as they say, recoup your lossess…”
“Maybe some other time,” Donnelly offered, glancing at the figure approaching the table. “Ah, did you call for a refill on your drink, Aaberg?”
Björn held off on making pithy comments, choosing instead to size up the new arrival. The slate-grey skirt and jacket combo, matched with dark stockings, black heels and the best-ironed dress shirt he’d seen in a week all added up to a “strictly business” agenda…whereas the rose eyeliner and copper hair done up in a ponytail hinted at a personality type accustomed to long vacations on beaches or tropical environments. As for age, he would’ve guessed mid-to-late 20s, possibly early 30s---slightly odd, but they were called “young professionals” for a reason, weren’t they? And, of course, the fact that she approached the table with a smile that blended politeness and professionalism didn’t hurt.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Aaberg,” the girl stated, her voice lightly tinted with a Liverpudlian lilt. Björn grinned. “It appears you have found him, then,” he replied. “Björn Mikhail Aaberg, at your service…and to what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Miss…”
“Rothschilde. Melanie Rothschilde. I was told by Mr. Stahl that you were expecting me?”
At the mention of Stahl’s name, Björn’s smile faded slightly. “He told me to expect a Miss Campbell.”
Melanie’s shoulders sagged a bit. “So you didn’t get the memo…”
“What memo?”
“Miss Campbell suffered a nasty fall in Las Vegas,” Melanie explained. “From what the authorities were able to gather, she got a bit…intoxicated and fell out of a fifteenth-story window---right into a swimming pool. Got a nasty scrape on the left side of her face, too…she’ll probably be out of action for the rest of the month.”
Something about the “explanation” didn’t sit right with Björn. “Where was she when this…accident occurred?”
“The LadyKiller Casino, if I remember correctly. The manager will be paying for her medical bills…in any case, Mr. Stahl sent me to handle the transaction Miss Campbell was going to oversee…with your approval, of course.”
After a few seconds of hesitation, Björn nodded. Campbell had always been somewhat of a pain---she rarely, if ever, spoke when she was with Stahl, and she always had that calm/bored look, like she either didn’t want to be there or just didn’t care for whatever was going on. “Very well, then. I was told that Mister Stahl had an interest in certain…information, that I have acquired, regarding matters that have long since passed from the public’s attention.”
“He was,” Melanie admitted, “and he still is.”
“Excellent,” Bjorn beamed. “I believe we can---“
His words were cut off by an annoyed hrumph. “Aren’t you, ah, forgetting something?” Richard muttered.
“Hmm? Ah, yes, of course! Where are my manners….Miss Rothschilde, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Richard Donnelly, one of the premiere power brokers of the Midwestern United States, and a man whose word is worth more than its weight in gold.” Melanie and Richard shook hands; “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Donnelly,” Melanie informed him.
“Likewise.”
Björn nodded. “Now that we’ve settled that matter, let’s get down to business, shall we?” His fingers steepled as he regarded Melanie from beneath furrowed brows; “Before we begin, I would like to make it clear that this information has been acquired through perfectly legal means,” he intoned. “None of it was ‘stolen’ or ‘taken’ from anyone, and could easily have been acquired by Mister Stahl himself, had he been given the time and resources necessary to search for it.” He gave a thin smile; “I hear he is still having financial troubles related to his…sizeable gambling debts,” he added. “Perhaps he intends to sell what I am offering him in order to pay off these debts…”
“I’m afraid I can’t disclose Mr. Stahl’s current financial situation,” Melanie apologized. “I was only authorized to proceed over the sale.”
Her words were met with another nod from Björn. “Perfectly understandable…now, as for the sale itself, I am afraid that such a sensitive transaction coud potentially be interrupted and/or taken advantage of in such an open environment as this.” He handed Melanie a piece of paper; “My room number,” he explained. “We will meet tomorrow night to negotiate the terms of sale---“
“Mr. Stahl requested that the sale take place tonight,” Melanie murmured. “I sincerely hope this won’t cause any problems…a pressing engagement came up last night, and Mr. Stahl has requested that the sale of the information take place as soon as possible.” Her expression was somewhat downcast, as if the idea of moving the sale to that night was presentign a major inconvenience for herself and Björn. “Again, I’m sorry if this whole thing will cause any problems with your own itenerary, Mr. Aaberg, but the sale must take place tonight, as per Mr. Stahl’s request.”
For a full three minutes, no-one at the table spoke.
Finally, Björn blew out a long, half-annoyed sigh. “As…sudden as this decision is,” he declared, “I will be more than happy to accommodate Mr. Stahl by rescheduling the sale of the information. I assume the time itself has been changed?”
“Yes, Mr. Aaberg---from the original 9:30 PM time to 10:42 PM.”
“Why’s he want the sale to be done so late at night?” Richard asked, confused. “I mean, I get why he didn’t want Björn to just go peddlin’ off whatever he’s sellin’ in broad daylight, but 10:42---“
“Mr. Stahl also requested that the sale take place in the hotel bar,” Melanie added. “He sent along a request to the hotel staff that the bar be closed early tonight, to allow the transaction to take place without any outside interference.”
Another drawn-out sigh from Björn hung in the air. “Does he wish that I attend the sale alone,” he asked quietly, “or am I allowed to bring security?”
“…I was told you were allowed to have three guards,” Melanie informed him. “All unarmed.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be unarmed as well, with two private security officers.”
“Fair enough.” Björn rose from his seat. “I take it our discussion is finished now---“
“Actually, sir,” Melanie added, “there is…one other thing.” She handed over a manilla envelope. “I was told to give this to you after the arrangements for the sale had been finalized,” she explained, “and to tell you to open it in the privacy of your hotel room.”
Richard arched an eyebrow. “And why should he wait until then?” he drawled.
“Security reasons,” Melanie politely explained. “Also, the papers inside contain substances that…have a rather negative reaction to excessive sunlight, such as the kind one might find in a Miami hotel courtyard.” She gave an apologetic smile; “I assure you that Mr. Stahl has a perfectly normal reason for all of these precautions, Mr. Aaberg, and that these measures are in no way a sign of distrust or---“
Her sentence was cut off by a laugh from Björn. “My dear Miss Rothschilde,” he chided, “I would never accuse Anders Stahl of not trusting me…he knows better than to even think such things. I respect and accept his stipulations, and look forward to our meeting tonight.” He shook Melanie’s hand; “I must commend Mister Stahl on his taste in business partners the next time we meet,” he noted. “You are, quite honestly, the least obnoxious of the couriers he has employed to convey messages thus far in our acquaintance…and might I add, you are also of a far more…pleasing variety than his past employees have been.”
Melanie smiled. “Well, I appreciate the comments, Mr. Aaberg,” she admitted, “but I must be going…I have another appointment to attend to, and I wouldn’t want to be late.”
Björn kissed her hand. “I would never dream of standing between you and your work.” He turned his attention to Richard; “Mister Donnelly, we will have to reschedule our rematch for your winnings. I will be spending the rest of the day categorizing what is to be sold to the beautiful Miss Rothschilde tonight, and there will be no time for us to have another game.”
“Fine by me,” Richard replied with a grin. “Gives me more time to practice.”
“Practice,” Björn admonished, “is only an empty gesture without discipline.”
Richard rolled his eyes. “That a Zen thing?”
“Something along those lines,” Björn replied. “Now, if you excuse me, I really must be going…”
Melanie cleared her throat. “You, ah, seem to have forgotten something, Mr. Aaberg…” She gestured to the table, where Björn’s car keys still lay next to his last winning hand before her arrival. “I wouldn’t leave those just lying around where anyone could get to them, sir,” she advised.
“Indeed…” Seeing as how his car was a state-of-the-art Koenigsegg, Björn couldn’t have afforded to leave the keys laying around for anyone to grab. “You have my thanks, Miss Rothschilde…as well as my gratitude, for sparing me the indignity of losing my automobile due to something so trivial as a careless mistake.” He nodded in her general direction, twirling the keys on his finger before pocketing them and giving a cheerful wave.
Richard shook his head. “That guy is just something else,” he muttered. “Fleeces you out of a thousand bucks one minutes, nearly forgets his car keys the next…and this was him on a good day.” He scoffed; “I’d hate to see what he’s like on a bad day,” he mused. “What do you think---“
He turned to ask Melanie the question directly, only to find that she wasn’t there.
“This day just gets weirder and weirder,” he muttered, blowing out an exasperated sigh. He glanced at the cards that were still on the coffee table, scowling; “This is the last time I let anyone talk me into playing gin rummy,” he grunted, setting off for the lobby with a frown.
A few seconds after he left, the cards effectively vanished into a greyish blur….
---------------------------
….which composed itself into the grey-clad shape of Melanie Rothschilde within a corridor somwhere inside the Fontainebleau. After checking over both shoulders to make sure she hadn’t been followed, Melanie ducked into the ladies room and secured the door.
There was no way she was going to let anyone walk in on her now….
After smoothing out her clothes, Melanie undid the scrunchie that bound her hair into a ponytail, shaking every strand loose with a quick nod of her head. Once her vibrant red locks were freed, she held up her right hand, flexing the fingers and focusing….then, with a slow, deliberate pace, she ran her hand through her hair, staring at her reflection in the mirror as the copper color slowly faded to a darker brown----aka the “natural” color of her hair.
And here, I thought it wouldn’t work…guess Anton really did know what he was talking about after all.
Once her proper hair color had been restored, “Melanie” quickly changed out of the business suit she’d bought as part of her cover---as Anton had told her on the ride to the airport, Stahl’s banking guild had a full suite of papers for a Melanie Rothschilde floating around in their servers already, so the ALPA’s best and brightest had no trouble securing them and giving one of their best Field Agents that identity for the jaunt to Miami. The fact that Björn Aaberg had effectively accepted a tracking beacon (the “sensitive chemicals” on the papers in the envelope were really picoscopic tracking strips) only aided their good fortune---if the deal could be made and then interrupted, they’d have him dead to rights.
Before that could happen, though, “Melanie Rothschilde” had to disappear for a few hours…and within the confines of the Fontainebleau’s ladies room, that’s exactly what happened. Melanie faded back into the ether from whence she’d been summoned…
…leaving Field Agent Vicki Lawson to pick up where she’d left off.
The thermally-activated hair dye was a nice touch, she mused, grinning at Anton’s latest “treat”---a dye that, when applied to hair (natural or synthetic), changed color according to the prominent temperature in whatever area it was used in. The copper tone “Melanie”’s flowing locks bore was triggered by the near-constant sun in Miami’s skies…and was deactivated just as quickly by Vicki’s near-frozen hand running through her hair and reversing the reaction. Still, she admitted, it’s nice to get back to being me for this part.
After stowing her business attire in a suitcase (and stowing said suitcase in the ceiling, by way of a loose panel she’d been notified about during her 395-minute flight from Las Vegas to Miami), Vicki felt around under the sink and removed yet another of Anton’s “toys”---an iPod-like tablet that was as thin as three SD cards stacked on top of each other. Richard Donnelly had instructed one of his people to leave the thing there, and it had gone unnoticed by the hotel’s usual clientelle for the majority of the day…not that any of them could’ve used it if they had found it. Donnelly had given Vicki the “key” that would allow her to activate the tablet---a dermal patch, applied to the palm of her hand, that held a barcode written in infrared ink.
Chalk another cool point up for Anton Malvineous…
Vicki touched her palm to the surface of the tablet, removing her hand after three seconds. When a prompt box appeared on the screen, she spoke her full name and title: “Field Agent Victoria Anne-Smith Lawson.” The tablet hummed quietly for a moment or two…
…then the screen lit up, prompting a grin from the brunette gynoid. “Let’s see what ‘Mr. Aaberg’ is up to…”
Predictably, Björn had casually laid the manilla envelope on a bedside table---allowing the micro-thin strip on one of the pages inside to function as a rather effective microphone (given the acoustics of the room) and pick up on even the slightest of sounds.
Time for a little eavesdropping…
“…and this Miss Rothschilde claimed that you sent her,” Björn was declaring---he’s already on the phone with Stahl? Looks like someone’s been reading up on their spy fiction---“and she claims that you are interested in the information I contacted you about last month.”
A long, drawn-out sigh from the phone Björn was holding sounded in Vicki’s ears; “I do not recall sending Miss Rothschilde to Florida,” the voice of Anders Stahl intoned, “but it is…quite possible that I deployed her after the unfortunate incident with Miss Campbell. I have not had the most agreeable time in Las Vegas, Mr. Aaberg; you picked a very inopportune moment to call me." Another sigh, this one sounding as if Stahl was on the verge of a migraine, entered Vicki’s range of hearing. “Conduct the sale as agreed, but…have your people follow Miss Rothschilde after she leaves. If someone else has contacted her, they will be eliminated…and the information shall be delivered to me by alternate means.”
“You mean, the information will be sold to you by other means,” Björn corrected. “As much as I have come to value the friendship between us, I will not stoop so low as to simply give information away---“
“I have neither the time nor the patience to debate this issue with you, Björn,” Stahl snapped. “You will give Miss Rothschilde the information, whether not she pays for it. If she does, it shall be from her own pocket. If not…then you will simply have to make up the cost of it on your own time.”
Björn, to his credit, managed to not sound completely and utterly pissed off. “I will consider it.”
“Consideration is for those who can fall back on other options,” Stahl coldly replied. “Despite the fact that I, too, value our friendship, I cannot---and will not---allow sentiment to take precedence over logic. Either the data reaches my office by tomorrow evening, or your employment will be ended…permanently.”
Vicki terminated the connection to Björn’s room, knowing that the only things she’d be hearing for the next few minutes would be swearing, the sounds of furniture breaking, and other such things. Had the circumstances been even the slightest bit different, Stahl’s ultimatum---and Björn’s more-than-predictable response---would’ve had the brunette gynoid painted into the proverbial corner. Seeing as how Vicki had acquired the Melanie Rothschilde persona during the flight to Miami, that very easily could’ve been the case…except Björn and Stahl both assumed that “Melanie” might be working for another party interested in the information up for sale.
Neither of them had any suspicion that the ALPA was involved…or that the “information” they were bartering over was worth far more than either of them imagined.
If the ALPA’s intel was correct, Björn Aaberg had managed to get his hands on Matthew Hannsen’s “research” on Project Epsilon, the Stylo virus and a number of other dangerous projects. Any one of them, in the wrong hands (though in Vicki’s line of thinking, few qualified as the “right” hands for this type of stuff) could lead to a massive clusterschmazz between any and all parties involved, potentially even unseating the infamous Bloody Valentine incident for putting the most red in the ALPA’s ledger.
Except I won’t let it get that far.
After checking to make sure that “Melanie’s” clothes were safely stowed away in the ceiling, Vicki smoothed out a few wrinkles in her own outfit and headed out. Her original plans involved getting a room at the Eden Roc hotel, but for purely strategic purposes lodging at the Fontainebleau was, the better choice.
Speaking of her room…
As she exited the ladies restroom, Vicki couldn’t help but notice a janitor leaning against the wall, snoring his head off as he slept on the job. And this is why I’m so glad that my work with the ALPA is never boring, she reminded herself, heading for the elevators. If I ever got caught nodding off like that, I’d head over to Tell’s for a full debug.
All thoughts of sleeping on the job vanished as she reached the elevator. Time to get dangerous…
---------------------------
Within the span of 30 minutes, Vicki had gone over every bit of equipment she’d need for her upcoming jaunt, to make sure that it all worked---and, more importantly, that she’d be able to use everything needed when/if the time came for it.
To her complete lack of surprise, everything was, indeed, in working order.
First and foremost, her own audio/visual sensor suite was still in prime condition; none of the major bits had degraded since her last encounter with Faceless (if anything, they’d improved---thanks in no small part to the decision to upgrade her and remove everything that could potentially be used as a weakness), and the rest of her systems were operating just as smoothly as ever. Physically, she wasn’t suffering from internal fatigue or myogel leakages---in short, V.I.C.I. was ready and waiting to carry out the mission she’d been given.
As for the rest of her gear…
The ES9950s were still loaded (with SCEMP rounds only), and both were still coded to only fire at the touch of Vicki’s own thumbprint on the grip. The listening/recording gear Anton had given her hadn’t even been taken out of the boxes yet; if any of those are broken, Vicki reflected, I may have a problem… She instantly rolled her eyes at the thought---the boxes had been shipped directly from ALPA HQ, so if the gear was broken, then she would have a lot more to worry about than just finishing the mission.
Next up to be inspected was her Field Agent uniform---which, as expected, was still in one piece. The security bag for her day-to-day attire was given a similar examination, with the same results; the brunette gynoid chose to change the combination on the bag’s lock anyways, just to be on the safe side.
Well, that’s the gear check taken care of…time for a room check.
The scan that followed didn’t exactly have much in the way of surprises. The room wasn’t bugged---at least, not anymore; someone had introduced all the usual bugs into the room earlier in the day, but they’d since been neutralized, removed and/or broken by the cleaning lady (a sleeper gynoid who engaged in Perimeter Sweep Pattern Alpha 44129 as soon as she entered Vicki’s room) while Vicki was out doing her Melanie Rothschilde gimmick.
Everything else was….everything else.
In short, the equipment check came up green: everything worked, and everything was ready.
“All I need to do now is figure out how to pass the time until then,” Vicki murmured. “I could go shopping, but that…might not end well…I don’t want to show up too early or too late at Björn’s room, and I definitley don’t want to get stalled on the way back to the hotel…might as well just chill and watch some TV---“
Something just out of the corner of her eye---more accurately, in the uppermost lefthand corner of the new and improved HUD she’d been given---pinged; Björn was apparently calling someone else from inside his hotel room. “Looks like that plain old manilla envelope wasn’t as plain as anyone thought,” she murmured. “Let’s take a listen and see just who it is that Björney the Dinosaur is trying to call up…” After a quick bit of reflection on how lame that pun was, the brunette gynoid listened in…
…and a few short minutes later, decided that chilling and watching TV probably wasn’t a good idea.
With one last examination of her hotel room, to make sure that the window was locked and that nobody could possibly enter through the ventillation grate in the ceiling, Vicki headed out once again---this time, to find a secure phone line that she could use to call ALPA HQ and tell them about what she’d just heard. If she got the news to them in time, and they were thus able to authorize her next move, there might be a chance of keeping Björn from doing something supremely stupid.
Considering the alternative, that was the best possible course of action they could take…
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The V.I.C.I. Diaries: A Criminal Mind Part 3
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DukeNukem 2417
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The V.I.C.I. Diaries: A Criminal Mind Part 3
Elvis Lives. Not in this timeline, but in quite a few others.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
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DukeNukem 2417
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Re: The V.I.C.I. Diaries: A Criminal Mind Part 3
“DragonTown” - Location Classified - August 21, 2011, 11:23 AM
As she pocketed her iPhone and stared through the window looking into the monitoring room, Jen Larssen didn’t exactly feel like telling Reaver the bad news---yes, they’d been partners long enough for this sort of thing to be commonplace now, but it still didn’t make it easier.
There was also the fact that Reaver would probably throw his cellphone. Again.
Something about getting put on “Hannsen duty” was clearly bugging him. This, in and of itself, wasn’t really that big of a surprise---anyone who had to spend more than five minutes watching the man who’d come to be known simply as The Maestro usually ended up wanting to pull his intestines out through his nose…or at least make him beg for such a fate.
…and this is why I wanted to take my vacation earlier this month, Jen mused, already hearing a muffled tirade of profanities from the room on the other side of the security door. He probably got the call right when I did.
Trying---and failing---to keep a sigh from escaping her lips, the gynoid Field Agent entered the monitor room.
“IF YOU EVEN THINK I’M NOT REPORTING YOU FOR THAT REMARK, HANNSEN, YOU’RE JUST AS STUPID AS YOU ARE INSANE!” Eric, to the surprise of absolutely nobody in the faciltiy, had taken offense to just about every single word out of Hannsen’s mouth---which, given the latter’s fondness for dry wit, sarcasm and cutting rejoinders in response to everything, wasn’t exactly news to Jen. “YOU ARE DAMN LUCKY I’M NOT IN THAT ROOM WITH YOU---“
“And what would you do if you were,” the Maestro calmly replied, “spit all over me?”
Whatever Eric shouted next was incomprehensible---a garbled mix of vowels and consonants that may have been something threatening. Whatever it was, Jen was quick to take over on headset duty---she deftly plucked the comm piece from Eric’s head and put it on herself, ignoring her partner’s sudden (and predictable) turn to yell at her. “Hannsen, we’re only trying to keep more people from getting killed,” she assured the Maestro, “so could you please just cooperate---“
“What’s in it for me?”
Jen frowned. “This isn’t ‘Let’s Make a Deal’---“
“Anyone ever tell you that you’d make a terrible mother?” Hannsen taunted. “Honestly…if you want someone to do something, never lead off with ‘this isn’t “Let’s Make a Deal”, sir’---or ‘madame’, if the situation requires that particular pronoun. You’ll have to try a bit harder than that.”
The “you’d make a terrible mother” comment galled Jen deeply---she’d been thinking of “settling down” with Eric and maybe even adopting a few kids, just to give herself something to look forward to (and to give Eric a reason not to stay active past his prime)---but she composed herself before replying. “I’ll be my own judge of character on how up-do-date my maternal instincts are,” she calmly stated. “And this isn’t about me, Hannsen, it’s about---“
“What this is about,” Hannsen cut in, “is something you couldn’t possibly begin to understand…”
That remark prompted a smirk---of all expressions---from the gynoid Field Agent. “Oh, really?”
Hannsen frowned. “Don’t try that ‘Oh, really’ crap with me, sunshine,” he muttered. “You, Yelly McShouty over there and the rest of your little friends have no idea what you’re getting into---when I broke the chain and hid from you bastards, I had plans…I had backup---“
“You also had a rather sizeable debt to Anders Stahl,” Jen casually remarked.
A bored yawn emanated from every speaker in the room. “Not as big as the debt Richard Donnelly owes one Björn Aaberg,” he replied. “Or as important as the small tidbit of information that Mr. Aaberg has just been told via cellphone call…”
The yawn transitioned seamlessly to a chuckle. “…something about Epsilon Mk II, I believe?”
“Not even close---“
“Oh, I know that wasn’t it,” Hannsen interjected. “It was in the call, though---just like that even jucier tidbit of gossipy goodness about…what was it? More Stylo cure research being stolen from a server farm in Detroit, owned by someone who just so happens to be on the ALPA’s permanent naughty list?”
Jen’s confident smile faded ever-so-slightly. “That…isn’t even what I was---“
“Then maybe it’s about all those names on that list I wrote two years ago, and how Björn’s been ordered to terminate them.”
The comm set fell to the floor with a clatter as Jen backed away from the monitors, staring in shock. “How…”
“I make it a point to find out when---and if---my requests are being followed,” Hannsen replied. “You seem a bit surprised, in my honest opinion; I thought you’d have figured that out by now…” Again, the chuckle---this time, with a much more sinister undertone to it---filled the room. “I have a certain knack for getting exactly what I want, when I want it…despite the best efforts of any group of over-paid, talentless hacks who might be trying their damndest to see me hang. How does that song lyric go, again? ‘I stand accused before you, I have no tears to cry….and you will never break me, until the day I die’---“
“THAT DAY’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK!” Reaver bellowed. “YOU SON OF A---“
“Better put a leash on your boyfriend there,” Hannsen cautioned Jen. “Wouldn’t want him to forget the kind of person he’s addressing, would we?” Every monitor in the room depicted him shaking his head derisively; “To be honest,” he mused, “I don’t know if putting a leash on him is a good thing, really…”
His voice turned to a sneer. “…after all, knowing him….he might like it---“
Whatever Jen tried to say to calm Eric down was drowned out by a chair being kicked over, followed soon after by Eric punching the edge of the setup that housed the montior bank. “YOU BASTARD! YOU SPINELESS, GUTLESS, WHORE-FACED SCUM-SUCKING BASTARD!” The entrance of five DragonTown security officers into the montior room was almost impossible to hear---even as one of them went for the syringe full of tranquilizer to get Eric out of the room, the Field Agent’s fist smashed into the officer’s face and sent him to the floor in a heap. Jen ran to help the man up as two other officers tried to sedate the enraged Field Agent. “I can explain,” the gynoid told the downed officer. “It was Hannsen, he was provoking him---“
“We know,” the officer replied, sounding as tired as he looked. “We heard the whole thing.”
“Then cut off the commlinks to his room, or something!” Jen pleaded. “Get him to shut up---“
“---RIP YOUR THROAT OUT!” Eric shouted, grabbing at the table as if he intended to tear each and every one of the monitors out of the wall and break them with his bare hands. “I WILL END YOU, HANNSEN, DO YOU HEAR ME?! I WILL FUCKING END YOU!”
After a few more minutes of commotion (with Hannsen’s laugh as the soundtrack), the guards finally managed to get Eric out of the room. “We’ll set up an appointment with an anger-management specialist,” the lead officer told Jen. “Hopefully, it’ll help him get over whatever Hannsen did to set him off.”
“I sincerely hope it does, sir,” Jen replied, thanking the officer.
Seconds later, the security door closed again, and the room was silent….for two whole minutes.
“That man,” Hannsen observed, “has some deep-seated aggression issues…”
Jen ignored the remark, and set about returning the chairs to their proper places. Unless the situation just so happened to be a crime scene, the gynoid could never stand to see furniture out of place; for years, she told herself that it was just her domestic programming kicking in, reminding her to keep things neat.
Except my own apartment looks the same today as it did seven years ago…misplaced chairs and all---
A loud throat-clearing noise cut off her revere. “Am I too boring for you?” Hannsen jeered.
“I was just putting the chairs back where they belong,” Jen replied. “You shouldn’t have set Eric off like that---if he’d been anywhere near your cell---“
“If he’d have been anywhere near my cell,” Hannsen shot back, no trace of humor in his voice, “at least fifteen or more people would’ve jumped him before he reached the door to it, and every single one of them would’ve had enough time to shank the bastard long before he got close enough to ‘rip my throat out’, or act on any of those stupid threats he made.” A note of smugness punctuated his next few words: “Of course, he probably would’ve broken into the wrong cell and beaten up the wrong guy…or am I thinking of the wrong case here---“
The solid, hollow clang that followed that sentence was enough to get the Maestro to shut up…though anyone with an actual sense of empathy would’ve been shocked to see a lone tear rolling down Jen’s cheek. “It was a simple mistake,” she whispered, ignoring the dent in the table as she raised her hand. “HQ got one digit wrong in the address…the house was usually empty that time of day, he didn’t know there was a birthday party…”
“And yet he chose to bust in without yelling ‘surprise’,” Hannsen chuckled, “and fire off a few tear gas rounds.”
Jen turned away from the montior. Very few people knew about the sole black mark on Eric’s record, or that the tear gas rounds he’d fired off had been recalled the previous day, due to containing a component that could lead to a rare---yet fatal---allergic reaction in certain people…which, as fate would have it, included three of the guests at the party Eric had mistakenly crashed (five, if one counted the grandparents---both of whom were using oxygen tanks). Two of those who’d had the reaction were taken to the hospital in time for the necessary treatment that kept them from succumbing to shock. As for the third… “He was about to blow out the candles,” Jen sobbed. “They were just finishing the song, and he was about to blow out the candles…” She remembered staring, horrified, as four of the guests were stretchered out…followed by the fifth being carted out in a body bag.
“Looks like ‘Reaver’ could’ve changed his name to ‘Reaper’, if you ask me,” Hannsen chuckled. “Or maybe---“
One of the monitors erupted in a shower of sparks and broken glass. “One more word,” Jen droned. “Say one more word, and I will find your cell, take this weapon---“ She raised the RF7590 (a slightly older gun than the ES9950) in her right hand. “---and give you as many compound cranial fractures as I can.”
“More like you’ll try,” Hannsen hissed. “Nobody in this hellhole can touch me…especially you.”
The gun fell from Jen’s limp hand. He was right, of course…it wasn’t even remotely fair, but he was right.
“And there it is,” Hannsen beamed. “This is what I love about this place….sooner or later, no matter how long it takes….everyone loses it eventually.” His voice took on an ugly edge: “…and sooner or later, everyone here learns their place on the food chain…which, inevitably, is several billion miles below me.”
At that moment, Jen wanted---more than anything---to wake up and find that this was all just a bad dream…
…except even her worst dreams were nowhere near as bad as her waking life tended to be.
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As she pocketed her iPhone and stared through the window looking into the monitoring room, Jen Larssen didn’t exactly feel like telling Reaver the bad news---yes, they’d been partners long enough for this sort of thing to be commonplace now, but it still didn’t make it easier.
There was also the fact that Reaver would probably throw his cellphone. Again.
Something about getting put on “Hannsen duty” was clearly bugging him. This, in and of itself, wasn’t really that big of a surprise---anyone who had to spend more than five minutes watching the man who’d come to be known simply as The Maestro usually ended up wanting to pull his intestines out through his nose…or at least make him beg for such a fate.
…and this is why I wanted to take my vacation earlier this month, Jen mused, already hearing a muffled tirade of profanities from the room on the other side of the security door. He probably got the call right when I did.
Trying---and failing---to keep a sigh from escaping her lips, the gynoid Field Agent entered the monitor room.
“IF YOU EVEN THINK I’M NOT REPORTING YOU FOR THAT REMARK, HANNSEN, YOU’RE JUST AS STUPID AS YOU ARE INSANE!” Eric, to the surprise of absolutely nobody in the faciltiy, had taken offense to just about every single word out of Hannsen’s mouth---which, given the latter’s fondness for dry wit, sarcasm and cutting rejoinders in response to everything, wasn’t exactly news to Jen. “YOU ARE DAMN LUCKY I’M NOT IN THAT ROOM WITH YOU---“
“And what would you do if you were,” the Maestro calmly replied, “spit all over me?”
Whatever Eric shouted next was incomprehensible---a garbled mix of vowels and consonants that may have been something threatening. Whatever it was, Jen was quick to take over on headset duty---she deftly plucked the comm piece from Eric’s head and put it on herself, ignoring her partner’s sudden (and predictable) turn to yell at her. “Hannsen, we’re only trying to keep more people from getting killed,” she assured the Maestro, “so could you please just cooperate---“
“What’s in it for me?”
Jen frowned. “This isn’t ‘Let’s Make a Deal’---“
“Anyone ever tell you that you’d make a terrible mother?” Hannsen taunted. “Honestly…if you want someone to do something, never lead off with ‘this isn’t “Let’s Make a Deal”, sir’---or ‘madame’, if the situation requires that particular pronoun. You’ll have to try a bit harder than that.”
The “you’d make a terrible mother” comment galled Jen deeply---she’d been thinking of “settling down” with Eric and maybe even adopting a few kids, just to give herself something to look forward to (and to give Eric a reason not to stay active past his prime)---but she composed herself before replying. “I’ll be my own judge of character on how up-do-date my maternal instincts are,” she calmly stated. “And this isn’t about me, Hannsen, it’s about---“
“What this is about,” Hannsen cut in, “is something you couldn’t possibly begin to understand…”
That remark prompted a smirk---of all expressions---from the gynoid Field Agent. “Oh, really?”
Hannsen frowned. “Don’t try that ‘Oh, really’ crap with me, sunshine,” he muttered. “You, Yelly McShouty over there and the rest of your little friends have no idea what you’re getting into---when I broke the chain and hid from you bastards, I had plans…I had backup---“
“You also had a rather sizeable debt to Anders Stahl,” Jen casually remarked.
A bored yawn emanated from every speaker in the room. “Not as big as the debt Richard Donnelly owes one Björn Aaberg,” he replied. “Or as important as the small tidbit of information that Mr. Aaberg has just been told via cellphone call…”
The yawn transitioned seamlessly to a chuckle. “…something about Epsilon Mk II, I believe?”
“Not even close---“
“Oh, I know that wasn’t it,” Hannsen interjected. “It was in the call, though---just like that even jucier tidbit of gossipy goodness about…what was it? More Stylo cure research being stolen from a server farm in Detroit, owned by someone who just so happens to be on the ALPA’s permanent naughty list?”
Jen’s confident smile faded ever-so-slightly. “That…isn’t even what I was---“
“Then maybe it’s about all those names on that list I wrote two years ago, and how Björn’s been ordered to terminate them.”
The comm set fell to the floor with a clatter as Jen backed away from the monitors, staring in shock. “How…”
“I make it a point to find out when---and if---my requests are being followed,” Hannsen replied. “You seem a bit surprised, in my honest opinion; I thought you’d have figured that out by now…” Again, the chuckle---this time, with a much more sinister undertone to it---filled the room. “I have a certain knack for getting exactly what I want, when I want it…despite the best efforts of any group of over-paid, talentless hacks who might be trying their damndest to see me hang. How does that song lyric go, again? ‘I stand accused before you, I have no tears to cry….and you will never break me, until the day I die’---“
“THAT DAY’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK!” Reaver bellowed. “YOU SON OF A---“
“Better put a leash on your boyfriend there,” Hannsen cautioned Jen. “Wouldn’t want him to forget the kind of person he’s addressing, would we?” Every monitor in the room depicted him shaking his head derisively; “To be honest,” he mused, “I don’t know if putting a leash on him is a good thing, really…”
His voice turned to a sneer. “…after all, knowing him….he might like it---“
Whatever Jen tried to say to calm Eric down was drowned out by a chair being kicked over, followed soon after by Eric punching the edge of the setup that housed the montior bank. “YOU BASTARD! YOU SPINELESS, GUTLESS, WHORE-FACED SCUM-SUCKING BASTARD!” The entrance of five DragonTown security officers into the montior room was almost impossible to hear---even as one of them went for the syringe full of tranquilizer to get Eric out of the room, the Field Agent’s fist smashed into the officer’s face and sent him to the floor in a heap. Jen ran to help the man up as two other officers tried to sedate the enraged Field Agent. “I can explain,” the gynoid told the downed officer. “It was Hannsen, he was provoking him---“
“We know,” the officer replied, sounding as tired as he looked. “We heard the whole thing.”
“Then cut off the commlinks to his room, or something!” Jen pleaded. “Get him to shut up---“
“---RIP YOUR THROAT OUT!” Eric shouted, grabbing at the table as if he intended to tear each and every one of the monitors out of the wall and break them with his bare hands. “I WILL END YOU, HANNSEN, DO YOU HEAR ME?! I WILL FUCKING END YOU!”
After a few more minutes of commotion (with Hannsen’s laugh as the soundtrack), the guards finally managed to get Eric out of the room. “We’ll set up an appointment with an anger-management specialist,” the lead officer told Jen. “Hopefully, it’ll help him get over whatever Hannsen did to set him off.”
“I sincerely hope it does, sir,” Jen replied, thanking the officer.
Seconds later, the security door closed again, and the room was silent….for two whole minutes.
“That man,” Hannsen observed, “has some deep-seated aggression issues…”
Jen ignored the remark, and set about returning the chairs to their proper places. Unless the situation just so happened to be a crime scene, the gynoid could never stand to see furniture out of place; for years, she told herself that it was just her domestic programming kicking in, reminding her to keep things neat.
Except my own apartment looks the same today as it did seven years ago…misplaced chairs and all---
A loud throat-clearing noise cut off her revere. “Am I too boring for you?” Hannsen jeered.
“I was just putting the chairs back where they belong,” Jen replied. “You shouldn’t have set Eric off like that---if he’d been anywhere near your cell---“
“If he’d have been anywhere near my cell,” Hannsen shot back, no trace of humor in his voice, “at least fifteen or more people would’ve jumped him before he reached the door to it, and every single one of them would’ve had enough time to shank the bastard long before he got close enough to ‘rip my throat out’, or act on any of those stupid threats he made.” A note of smugness punctuated his next few words: “Of course, he probably would’ve broken into the wrong cell and beaten up the wrong guy…or am I thinking of the wrong case here---“
The solid, hollow clang that followed that sentence was enough to get the Maestro to shut up…though anyone with an actual sense of empathy would’ve been shocked to see a lone tear rolling down Jen’s cheek. “It was a simple mistake,” she whispered, ignoring the dent in the table as she raised her hand. “HQ got one digit wrong in the address…the house was usually empty that time of day, he didn’t know there was a birthday party…”
“And yet he chose to bust in without yelling ‘surprise’,” Hannsen chuckled, “and fire off a few tear gas rounds.”
Jen turned away from the montior. Very few people knew about the sole black mark on Eric’s record, or that the tear gas rounds he’d fired off had been recalled the previous day, due to containing a component that could lead to a rare---yet fatal---allergic reaction in certain people…which, as fate would have it, included three of the guests at the party Eric had mistakenly crashed (five, if one counted the grandparents---both of whom were using oxygen tanks). Two of those who’d had the reaction were taken to the hospital in time for the necessary treatment that kept them from succumbing to shock. As for the third… “He was about to blow out the candles,” Jen sobbed. “They were just finishing the song, and he was about to blow out the candles…” She remembered staring, horrified, as four of the guests were stretchered out…followed by the fifth being carted out in a body bag.
“Looks like ‘Reaver’ could’ve changed his name to ‘Reaper’, if you ask me,” Hannsen chuckled. “Or maybe---“
One of the monitors erupted in a shower of sparks and broken glass. “One more word,” Jen droned. “Say one more word, and I will find your cell, take this weapon---“ She raised the RF7590 (a slightly older gun than the ES9950) in her right hand. “---and give you as many compound cranial fractures as I can.”
“More like you’ll try,” Hannsen hissed. “Nobody in this hellhole can touch me…especially you.”
The gun fell from Jen’s limp hand. He was right, of course…it wasn’t even remotely fair, but he was right.
“And there it is,” Hannsen beamed. “This is what I love about this place….sooner or later, no matter how long it takes….everyone loses it eventually.” His voice took on an ugly edge: “…and sooner or later, everyone here learns their place on the food chain…which, inevitably, is several billion miles below me.”
At that moment, Jen wanted---more than anything---to wake up and find that this was all just a bad dream…
…except even her worst dreams were nowhere near as bad as her waking life tended to be.
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Elvis Lives. Not in this timeline, but in quite a few others.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
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DukeNukem 2417
- Posts: 1213
- Joined: Mon Aug 29, 2005 9:26 am
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Re: The V.I.C.I. Diaries: A Criminal Mind Part 3
Fontainebleau Hotel — Miami, Florida — August 21, 2011, 09:10 PM
The hallway leading to Björn Aaberg’s hotel room was, like most of the other hallways in the Fontainebleau on this particular night, quiet. Under the circumstances that most people would refer to as “normal”, this wouldn’t mean anything particularly interesting---hallways were, after all, usually empty at this time of night, and anyone who was still lurking around, for whatever reason, probably had no logical (or legal) excuse to be there.
Of course, for Vicki Lawson, circumstances could rarely---if ever---be classified as anything that even remotely resembled “normal”.
For one, there was the matter of the maid…and the fact that her head was detatched from her body.
Again, under a different set of circumstances, Vicki having removed a maid’s head would instantly qualify as the farthest thing from “normal”---but, in a sort of twisted ironic way, this was normal for her. Her own head had been removed and reattached more than a few times, and she’d never been the worse for wear…
…though that probably had something to do with the fact that she---like the maid---was a gynoid.
“If you can hear me,” Vicki murmured to the disembodied maid’s head, “I am so sorry that I had to do this…it’s just a security precaution to make sure that you don’t got blabbing on me to Björn or anyone else.” Even as she said this, the power screwdriver in her hand threw off a spark as it hit something within the neck stump of the gynoid maid’s head. “My bad…that was completely by accident.”
As soon as she was sure that the maid wouldn’t be raising any alarms any time soon, Vicki edged her way out of the storage closet from the corridor (she wasn’t about to dismantle a maid gynoid in plain view of any paying customers) and headed for Björn’s hotel room. The meeting with “Melanie Rothschilde” was set to take place just under an hour from then, but Vicki didn’t care---she had no intention of arriving on time (or at all, for that matter), and would in fact be leaving Miami before Björn even knew what the hell was going on. Anyone else would’ve chalked it up to her feeling a shred of remorse for deactivating a feellow gynoid without her consent…
…but to be honest, it was more about her wanting (and needing) to deactivate the other security systems that were put in place to keep the lowly commoners from getting into Aaberg’s room and accessing the oh-so-vital information on his PC.
Easier than acing a physics test.
The numerical keypad/private keycard lock combo---specially installed at Björn’s request, and at considerable expense to the Fontainebleau---had been meant to stifle any attempts at breaking into the room..and, had anyone other than Vicki tried to crack the keypad, it might’ve worked. Of course, a little Detaining Grip applied into the rather sensitive keycard reader threw the built-in magnets completely out of whack, thus overriding the lock and allowing the brunette gynoid to slip into the room like a professional cat burglar (though she made a mental note to look up the origin of the term “cat burglar” after the whole thing was over with). The pressure sensors that should’ve kicked as soon as she set foot in the room were placed too far away from the door (and too far apart from each other) to make any major difference; thus, she literally tiptoed over/between them to reach the room proper…after closing and locking the door (the inside lock hadn’t been given a keypad).
So far, so good.
Nearly everything in the room that could be fitted with a lock had been---apparently, Aaberg had a lot of friends in the hotel business, and as such had been able to arrange for these “high security” locks to be installed in his room. Of course, such locks were only designed with the intention of keeping things out of reach from human thieves and intruders; in Vicki’s hands, the so-called “unbreakable” locks were safely (and quietly) clicked open thanks to the precise manipulation of their tumblers by a nifty little ALPA tool known simply as the MasterKey.
Once they were defeated, the real challenge began.
The passwords on Björn’s five laptops (two MacBooks, a Dell, an HP and one generic laptop with no badge) and the lone desktop computer (another Dell---an Inspiron that was running the already-outdated Windows Vista, at that) were almost too easy to crack, even though Björn had gone for a password far more complex than “God”, “sex” or any number of vulgar terms most in-name-only “computer savvy” types tended to fall back on. Vicki simply used a program to search out repeated phrases typed into the computer, and used the one that had been typed the most often over the past few days---“kernargfagel9962XYJ”.
I’ll admit, he’s got a pretty good password…I have a hard time picturing “kernargfagel9962XYJ” ever being used in conversation.
After the login screens faded out (big mistake, Björney---different computers should ALWAYS have different passwords), Vicki found herself confronted with a security measure that, by her standards, was actually pretty damn clever: every single file on every laptop was encrypted. The measure was intended to keep a would-be hacker busy trying to sort everything out---separating the wheat from the chaff, to use the biblical term---until the owner of the computer returned to kick the crap out of them and have hotel security haul them off…unless, of course, the aforementioned would-be hacker had the resources (and allies) available to Vicki Lawson.
Case in point: the thin tablet left for her by Richard Donnelly’s crew.
Specialized cords ran from five ports on the tablet and hooked up to each laptop in turn, running the built-in decryption programs as soon as they were connected. With the tablet doing most of the work for her as far as the laptops were concerned, Vicki turned her attention to the Inspiron…and shook her head disdainfully. She’d never really been all that fond of Dell computers, ever since that brief period of time in 2006 where her only PC had been an already-craptacular Dell Dimension L933r with an 18 gigabyte hard drive…primitive even for its day. The memory of begging Ted for a better computer---and subsequentally getting an HP desktop with hard drive space in the triple-digit gigabyte range---briefly rose to the forefront of her thoughts before she forced it aside…though not before smirking at the memory of Jamie “accidentally” dropping the L933r down a flight of stairs after it had been replaced. The only ones who’d yelled then had been the Bloombergs---aka the family that made the Brindles look like saints.
Now, on the other hand….
Vicki shook herself out of the revere and returned her attention to the Inspiron---which, to her annoyance, was already beginning to show signs of slowdown. Just like the Dimension, she grimaced, blowing out an agitated breath from between her teeth. It took a full fifteen seconds (as opposed to five) for the C Drive icon to register that it had, in fact, been clicked---I guess even Björn didn’t feel like trying to install security software on this brick---and only a bit less time for the screen to scroll down with the mouse wheel.
The annoyance that Vicki had already felt at the Inspiron only intensified when she got to the folder that (more than likely in bad humor) had been labeled “TOP SECRET”---and found that it contained nothing but the ISO files for a pirated copy of the latest Call of Duty game. Three other folders, each with imposing names, all held similarly worthless items; apparently, Björn (or one of his friends) had been having quite a bit of fun pulling an all-nighter or two on Megaupload and downloading whatever the hell they felt like getting. Over half the hard drive had already been filled with useless ISO files and bloated RAR and ZIP archives, with the rest containing pictures of Björn and various women that looked like parodies of vacation photos.
Despite her urge to smash the Inspiron to bits with her bare hands, Vicki decided against it in the end. Björn had probably let one of his suboordinates go crazy on Megaupload just to fill the hard drive…and to attract anyone who might want to get the information he felt like selling.
That, or he was planning to “give” the Inspiron to the buyer, and leave them with the proverbial empty bag.
Not exactly a great way to bolster client relations there, Björney…
With a sigh, the brunette gynoid returned her attention to the laptops and the decryption tablet.
The little gadget was doing a pretty damn good job of sorting through the files; it had already flagged the vast majority of encrypted data as old e-mails, Solitaire games and other such useless junk. In what could only be considered one hell of a backup plan, however, a select few encrypted files on each laptop were actually pieces of larger files---specifically, they were parts of a RAR archive. Vicki considered copying the files to the tablet (it had a surprisingly high storage capacity---32 gigs, to be precise), but when she noticed a display on it showing “file copy progress”, she realized the thing was already doing that task itself. Good thing Donnelly’s on my side, she mused, nodding her approval. Now, then, let’s see---
Something inside the unlocked closet moved.
Only her split-second thinking kept Vicki from blasting the living hell out of the door; she hadn’t actually opened the closet after unlocking it, mainly because she didn’t want a cavalcade of luggage falling down on her. In what could only be considered a vast stroke of luck, the laptops and tablet were all on the farthest side of the room from the closet---and close to the bed, which had just enough space underneath for Vicki to store the laptops by closing them halfway and shoving all five (with the tablet still connected) beneath the bed.
Just a few all-too-short seconds later, the closet door opened.
In a few short seconds, Vicki---who’d been mentally kicking herself as soon as she heard something moving inside the closet---realized that Björn had not, in fact, left a security drone in the closet…at least, not one that he legally owned.
Even more shocking was the fact that the figure that fell out of the closet happened to be Jake Brightstar.
“What the hell?!” The brunette gynoid managed to catch Jake just before he hit the floor; from the looks of it, he’d been shackled and left for dead by Aaberg’s cronies earlier in the day---or possibly in the week. “Jake, are you okay? Talk to me! JAKE!” Vicki lightly slapped Jake’s face, hoping to rouse him out of whatever state of unconsciousness he’d been in (be it blunt-force trauma or a drug-induced stupor). “C’mon, Jake, you’ve survived worse than this…”
After a few seconds, Jake groaned. “Steak Sauce?”
“Not even close,” Vicki teased, smiling briefly. “What the hell were you doing in Björn Aaberg’s closet?”
Jake groaned again. “Somehow, I thought I was headed for a car crusher,” he muttered. “Guess that’s what I get for trying to spy on Aaberg without checking the entire layout of the building…two of his idiots jumped me and I wasn’t able to call on any of my support crew for backup---“
“Your support crew?” Vicki echoed, arching an eyebrow.
“I’ve always sucked at doing solo work,” Jake admitted, “and Celeste agreed to lend me one or two of her more promising new recruits while the others stick to helping rebuild the House…but Aaberg’s goon squad busted up my phone before I could even think of calling them. Björn himself said he was going to drag me out to Miami Beach, stick me on a boat, fit me with a pair of cement shoes and let me sink…” He shook his head. “I don’t even know why the hell I got involved in this, Vicki.”
The brunette gynoid sighed. “At least you’re still alive,” she offered. “You’re just lucky it was me who stopped in here and unlocked the closet---Aaberg probably would’ve forgotten about you after he met with me later on tonight---“
“Met with you?!”
“Me in disguise,” Vicki clarified. “I’m posing as a representative of Anders Stahl, with a generous offer to buy information that Björn has up for sale.” She grinned again; “Seeing as how I’m copying the files to a secure storage medium right now, though,” she added, “I think that appointment has officially been cancelled---“
Jake gripped her shoulders. “No. Come back for the scheduled appointment, and let me handle Björn---“
“Jake,” Vicki breathed, “You’re a good person, and I’d be honored if you volunteered to have my back in any other situation, but PLEASE don’t try to play Lancelot here. I’m not a damsel, and I sure as hell don’t feel like I’m in any particular distress---and this is my mission, as well---so let’s just forget about who handles what, get what I came for and get the hell out of here before Aaberg comes back. I already had to dismantle a maid to keep her from alerting Aaberg---and if you say anything about recruiting her…”
“Depends on which maid you dismantled,” Jake replied, his smirk showing a glimmer of his usual bravado.
Not surprisingly, Vicki didn’t think it was all that amusing. “This isn’t the time for you to be recruiting new members to your ‘crew’, Jake,” she admonished, “and the Fontainebleau won’t take too kindly to you running off with one of their brand-new maid units. I’ll reattach her head before we leave, and erase the memory of her ‘down time’---you, meanwhile, will be on your way to the ground floor via the elevator, and take the cab that’ll be waiting out front to---JAKE, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!”
Even as she’d been talking to him, Jake---now wearing a weird sort of backpack---was making his way towards the window. “Sorry, Vicki,” he called out, “but I’ve got plans of my own.” He grinned as he opened the window and stood on the ledge; “BE SEEING YOU!”
“Jake, don’t---“ Vicki’s protest came too late, as Jake jumped out the window; the gynoid ran over, dreading what she was about to see---
---and, upon seeing what had happened to Jake, instantly wanted to punch him in the middle of his face.
The backpack had dissolved (for lack of a better term) to reveal a complex mechancial setup that, upon first glance, looked completely useless…until the two “arms” resting at its side folded up and out, the nozzles at the end spurting to life like miniature jet engines. Even as he soared unsteadily towards another building, Jake was whooping it up the whole time, laughing as the crude-but-effective jetpack carried him off.
“That clever little prick,” Vicki muttered, her pissed-off mood giving way to an impressed smile.
A few minutes later, with the laptops back out from under the bed, the gynoid Field Agent was piecing together the RAR archive from the bits saved to the tablet---and instantly found herself hating Björn Aaberg even more than she already did. The hit list she’d called the ALPA about earlier was there, along with vague mockups for an Epsilon Mk II…but what truly stirred the gynoid’s ire was a list of “clients”, followed by an identical list of “targets”---both of which included names of prominent ALPA and Coalition company heads and researchers, as well as unaffiliated benefactors for organizations on both sides of the coin. Stahl’s name was on both lists in the “maybe” column, meaning that Aaberg was either going to take him on as a permanent client…
…or terminate their working relationship in a far-too permanent manner.
Apart from the “target/client” lists, Aaberg had been keeping a running tab on various factors whereever he stayed, with the most noticable being a list of potential “new girls” for his ever-growing entourage. Many of the names listed for Miami were gynoids working at the Fontainebleau---including the maid who’d been taken down by Vicki a little under an hour ago---and several others had ALPA database numbers…including at least five sleepers in close proximity to the Fontainebleau.
The fact that “Melanie Rothschilde” was the newest entry on the Miami list really didn’t help.
I am so going to enjoy watching Aaberg get hauled off for this, Vicki mused, shutting off all five laptops and disconnecting them from the tablet. If the ALPA could use the info she’d gathered to build a case against Björn and connect him to whatever the hell the Maestro had been doing---
Oh, SCRAP!
All feelings of triumph faded instantly as soon as Vicki realized her colossal error---she’d completely forgotten to follow up any leads on why Matthew Hannsen had come to Miami. Nearly everything she’d just done had been for nothing---
Wait a minute.
Her attention turned, once again, to the Inspiron (which she hadn’t bothered to shut down), and the hard drive loaded with useless crap…except it might not be useless crap, she realized. Aaberg’s encryption trick had already been used on the laptops, to great effect; what if each and every bit of “bloatware” on the Inspiron was hiding other files as well?
Might as well give it a shot…
Vicki checked every archive file, regardless of format, size or seeming insignificance---and, just a few minutes later, shook her head in disbelief. Once again, Björn had gone for the strategy of hiding stuff in plain sight by putting vital information and files inside otherwise worthless archives, most of which had been obtained using methods of dubious legality. Had the police or any other authority found the tons of junk he’d downloaded, the files would’ve simply been deleted---and the important data would’ve been erased with them…or worse, those same files would’ve been noticed by a curious computer repair shop employee (or any number of other people tasked with cleaning up the PC) and mentioned to said employee’s superiors…
…and I don’t even want to think of how bad things could get from there.
Despite all prior training and being told never to even think of removing a critical piece of evidence from what was obviously a crime scene (last time I checked, locking an unconcsious person in a closet did, in fact, count as kidnapping them), Vicki realized that she just didn’t have enough time to go through the files stored on the Inspiron’s hard drive and put the pieces together one by one.
She’d have to take the damn thing with her.
A quick check of her internal chronometer revealed that it was just hitting 9:30 at that moment; if the computer in question was anything other than a Dell Inspiron with a half-filled hard drive, she would’ve been more than happy to sit there and zip through its contents without a care in the world…but the recalcitrant Inspiron was already demonstrating why that idea would’ve been tantamount to suicide. Even with just seven windows open (I’d blame it on Psycho McCrazyMask if he wasn’t still chained to a hospital bed), the stupid thing was taking its sweet time to load---and thanks to the delay between her clicking on things and them actually reacting, windows were being minimized and maximized at a semi-random pace, which did absolutely nothing to improve Vicki’s mood. She almost yelled “WORK, YOU STUPID PIECE OF CRAP!”, before remembering that more than a few of the Fontainebleau’s guests were probably asleep by now.
The Hell with this…
With all the grace of a predatory jungle cat, Vicki ripped one side panel off of the Inspiron and grabbed the hard drive, plucking it free from its moorings. The monitor connected to the Inspiron blanked out, while the cooling fan chose that moment to sputter and die. Not my problem, the brunette gynoid reminded herself. I just need to get out of here with the hard drive before anyone else shows up…and this is usually the part where the door opens right after I say “before anyone else shows up”, so I need to leave now!
After re-locking everything (including the closet), returning the laptops to where she’d found them, and turning the Inspiron to face away from the door (not that it mattered---Björn would see how damaged it was soon enough), Vicki headed for the window---and, just like at the LadyKiller, spotted a bus parked outside.
Here goes nothing…
With one final look back at Björn’s hotel room, she leapt from the window.
The impact with the roof of the bus didn’t exactly hurt---Vicki’s upgrades effectively nullified the shock and left her physically undamaged---but only her quick thinking allowed her to land on her feet---if she’d gone for the “cannonball” approach, the hard drive and tablet would’ve shattered in her grasp.
At least I got back before Björn got back to the hotel room…
Twenty minutes later, in a room at the Eden Roc reserved for Melanie Rothschilde (Vicki had paid for the room to keep Aaberg or anyone else who might be tailing her from figuring out “Melanie’s” true intentions), Vicki stared at the computer screen that the Inspiron’s hard drive had been hooked up to. She’d expected to find a second set of lists hidden away within the pirated games and bootlegged movies, or some new version of the Stylo virus; part of her even expected to find A.I.s from ALPA or Coalition companies.
What she found instead…was horrifying beyond words.
Every single file she’d found hidden in the RAR, ZIP and BIN archives had the security stamp carried by all data from Project Apollo---the same carte blanche program that, back in the dark ages of the 1980s, had given Ted Lawson the resources necessary to create the Variable Industrial Cybernetic Implement, later changed to the Voice Input Cybernetic Identicant….aka V.I.C.I….aka Vicki herself. That, however, wasn’t what sent the chill down her titanium-carbon spine, or what gave her that all-too-familiar sinking feeling somewhere in the pit of the chemically-treated sac within her abdomen that served as her stomach.
That honor went to the timestamp on each file….a timestamp dated July 30, 2011.
Project Apollo…is still active?!
Ted had told her that the project was shut down, that it had been written off in 1990 due to budget problems and “other stuff”….so why in the hell was the Maestro stealing data for it?!
“Chills the blood, doesn’t it?”
Vicki almost flinched at the sound of Hannsen’s voice coming from the computer she’d hooked the Inspiron’s hard drive up to. “Where did you get all this data?” she droned, her voice sounding toneless even to her own ears. “Project Apollo has been---“
“Carried on in secret, under the watchful eyes of the Artificial Lifeform Protection Agency,” Hannsen replied, “in every city and every nation from Lake Geneva to---wait, no….that’s ‘West End Girls’, sorry. ANYWAY, as I was saying before my train of thought momentarily derailed, Project Apollo is, in fact, still being worked on to this very day, no matter how many government-sponsored loonies will try to tell you otherwise. More to the point, I’m more than a bit surprised that you didn’t comment on what was in those files….”
The only reason Vicki hadn’t, in fact, commented on what was in the files was the fact that the images she was looking at were either part of someone’s sick joke…or something straight out of any nightmare that didn’t involve Faceless.
“Go ahead,” Hannsen whispered. “Why don’t you start with that rather large PDF file…”
Despite the sting of artificial tears in her eyes, Vicki read the name of the file. “V.I.C.I. Mk III Schematics.”
Hannsen’s chuckle rang in her ears like dice in a cup. “See, I’d really love to tell you that those were from last month---after Little Billy Rengold tried to turn you into robo-kebab, but they’re actually from ’93---seems old Teddy Boy was planning a major retrofit that he never got to work on.” He gave a disappointed sigh; “Oh, I’d love to have seen the look on your face when you read that file name,” he taunted. “Still, the fact remains: if ANY of these files got leaked, a lot of people would be in a LOT of---“
“No.”
“A lot of ‘no’? Sorry, but even by my standards, that doesn’t---“
“You’re not going to leak the files. You’re going to delete them from this hard drive, and then you’re going to---“
“I’M not going to do ANYTHING unless I FEEL LIKE DOING IT!” Hannsen barked. “You don’t seem to get the picture, ‘Agent Lawson’, so allow me to spell it out: YOU HAVE NOTHING TO THREATEN ME WITH! I’m already in prison, and thanks to a few well-planned ‘mishaps’, it’s not like anyone’s just going to burst into my cell and shank me to death in the middle of the night!” His shouting degenerated into a deranged giggle. “This never gets old,” he sighed blissfully. “Watching you so-called professionals just break down…”
V.I.C.I. fought the urge to punch the screen. “What do you want from me, Hannsen?”
“Now that is a good question…and luckily for you, I happen to have quite a good answer. What I want from you is for you to not go to Havana, Cuba, as originally planned---and yes, I happen to know all about your itenerary for the week, so don’t bother trying to puzzle over it---and instead book a flight to Athens, Greece, where you’ll be getting the full scoop on my itenerary. As much as I enjoy watching you fumble about in the dark, trying to figure out why I went where I did when I slipped the leash, seeing you cock about trying to get on Aaberg’s computer just sort of takes all the fun out of it. I want action, and drama…not this boring---“
“I’M NOT DOING ANY OF THIS FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT!” V.I.C.I. snapped.
Her anger only prompted more derisive laughter from the Maestro. “Oh-ho, so the girl finally grows a spine and fights back, does she? Pretty funny stuff, especially considering your track record…I really thought you’d have learned to mind your manners around your betters, Lawson---“
“YOU’RE NOT MY ‘BETTER’, HANNSEN!”
Hannsen’s voice dropped to a positively venomous leer. “Care to bet on that….Vicki?”
Even with her fists clenched and poised to smash the monitor, the brunette gynoid knew that breaking her own PC out of rage would do nothing to help her beat Hannsen. “This isn’t Vegas, Hannsen,” she murmured. “I don’t bet unless---“
“Unless you know you can win? Good call…except this time, you can’t---“
“I don’t bet unless I know everything about who I’m up against…even a common thief like you.”
Hannsen’s laugh faded out. “A common thief?!” On the other end of the line (probably in his prison cell, Vicki reminded herself), the criminal mastermind drew in a quick, annoyed breath; after a few seconds of silence, he exhaled, sounding noticably calmer. “For your information,” he drawled, “there is nothing ‘common’ about what I do. My skills are legendary in certain circles---yours obviously not included---and to be quite honest, I don’t know if you’re even worthy of trying to figure out what it was I did during my all-too-brief freedom---“
“This isn’t about me being worthy,” Vicki shot back, “or any of your other stupid crappy excuses. This is about you being brought to justice---“
“Already been there,” Hannsen drawled. “The only black mark on my otherwise perfect record.”
Somewhere within Vicki’s mind, the smallest sliver of that old, dark desire---wanting to kill someone---began to rise…only to be quickly buried again. “Your record is as far from perfect as humanly possible, Hannsen,” she calmly replied. “You’ve made mistakes before---just like you’re making them now. Letting Aaberg handle your data was the biggest screw-up you’ve made up to now…”
A smirk played at her features. “…and something tells me you’re going to top yourself before the week ends.”
Hannsen’s answering chuckle was dry, humorless and damn near acidic. “If you’re so dead-set on seeing me fail,” he sneered, “then maybe you should call up your friends and tell them to just break down my cell door and put me out of my misery forever…unless you want to keep the chase going.”
“Oh, I really do,” Vicki beamed. “To be honest, Hannsen, this whole thing is actually sort of…dare I say…fun.”
Silence.
With a derisive chuckle, Vicki turned off the computer connected to the Inspiron’s hard drive. Though her face showed calmness that Bhuddist monks would find admirable, her thoughts were a veritable typhoon---rage, guilt, fear and nearly every other emotion that could possibly drag her down coursed through every single circuit within her CPU, all of them nearly deafening in their intensity…
…but not nearly loud enough to drown out the knocking on her door.
“Miss Rothschilde? Miss Rothschilde, are you here?”
A few seconds worth of concentration allowed Vicki to assume the Liverpudlian accent she’d sported earlier in the day. “Yes?”
“This is Björn Aaberg….we met at the Fontainbleau this morning. May I---“
“NO! I….I, ah, I’m not decent…just got out of the bath….” Damn, damn, damn, why is he here, right now….
“….my apologies, Miss Rothschilde. I simply dropped by to tell you that---with great regret on my own part---I must cancel our meeting to discuss the sale of information to Mister Stahl. Someone has broken into my hotel room and seen fit to vandalize my personal property…I believe they may have also stolen something of mine.”
“Stolen what?” Vicki blurted, still using Melanie’s voice.
The drawn-out sigh that answered her question proved her suspicions all too well. “I believe that a young man who was…attempting to obsevre my activities earlier today may have absconded with the hard drive containing data---the same data, in fact, that I was going to sell to Mister Stahl. I’ve heard some rather remarkable stories about someone jumping out of the window of my room with…” Aaberg chuckled. “…a jetpack, if such tales can be believed…but the description of the so-called rocketeer matches that of this would-be spy.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Vicki asked, hoping to give the impression that Melanie Rothschilde would be more than happy to accommodate Aaberg by arranging another sale (or at the very least reimbursing him for the stolen data).
“I’m afraid not…but Mister Stahl has assured me that you will not be reprimanded despite the failure to acquire the data. He was upset at the news of the theft, of course…the police are doing their best to apprehend the fool who broke into my suite, and seeing as how the data is rather…sensitive…I do not wish to involve more people than those who are already investigating this…admittedly heinous affair.” A muttered Norweigian curse word punctuated the sentence…
…followed by what was, unmistakeably, an oath against “Brightstar”.
He thinks Jake did this?! Vicki neary gasped. It wasn’t too farfetched of a plan, to be honest; Aaberg had left Jake chained up in the closet, most likely “sure” that he couldn’t escape…only to return to his room and find the Inspiron missing its hard drive, and the closet locked---but missing its occupant.
“I’m sorry I can’t do more to assist you with this matter,” she told Aaberg. “If there’s anything I can do…”
“I appreciate the offer, Miss Rothschilde,” Aaberg replied wearily, “but I must be going.”
With that, Aaberg (and at least three bodyguards) moved away from the door; Vicki’s enhanced hearing picked up every muttered swearword and oath as they trudged down the hall, promising swift and painful vengeance against “the one called Brightstar”.
All at once, the feelings of self-loathing, fear and rage subsided, but the guilt still remained---stronger than before, this time. “They think Jake did it,” she muttered. “They think Jake broke out of their room with the hard drive…” It wasn’t exactly a stretch of the imagination for her to realize what was going on---Jake, flying away in a jetpack and laughing like a fool, had caught the attention of the crowds below far more than some girl jumping onto a bus---
---except the crowd should’ve noticed that the girl jumping onto a bus didn’t so much jump as she fell….
…and that she’d landed on her feet.
“They were ignoring me,” Vicki realized. “They all heard it, but…they didn’t react at all---“
“Surprised?”
Oberon’s voice in her ear nearly prompted a scream from the brunette gynoid. “What…how did you---“
“You’re not the only one who took a red-eye flight to Miami,” the ALPA Chairman informed her. “That crowd of random people near the bus---the same crowd that saw Jake Brightstar flying off into the night---were all ALPA operatives from the local office. No gynoids or androids---otherwise Björn might’ve suspected something---and all of them told that if two people went flying out of the window, ignore the second one….and for the record, I know that Aaberg is after Jake now---“
“So you’re not going to do anything to help him?!”
“We’ll get him out of the state and as far away from Aaberg’s people as possible. After that, he’s on his own.”
Vicki sighed. “The Maestro contacted me after I hooked the Inspiron’s hard drive up to one of the laptops here; apparently, he wants me to go to Greece---“
“Then we’ll get you on the first flight there tomorrow morning. Havana’s a bit…busy this time of year, and we don’t want to risk bringing you to Singapore quite yet---some SPS-style attacks have put the local ALPA branch on edge, and we’re trying to get that sorted out before we start anything else there….on a completely different note, what exactly was on that Inspiron hard drive---“
“Project Apollo data. Current Project Apollo data.”
A pause… “Vicki, you must understand something---“
“I’ll understand it when I get back from Greece,” the brunette gynoid interjected. “Right now, I want to make damn sure that Matthew Hannsen is punished for every single stupid thing he’s done…the Project Apollo thing can keep until I’m back in San Jose.”
She could sense Oberon’s smile as he replied. “Couldn’t have put it better myself. Oh, and Vicki?”
“Yeah?”
“I think I’d be remiss in my duties if I ended this call without giving you some sound advice for the journey ahead, so even though this goes without saying, I thought I might as well pass along this little kernel of wisdom anyways….keep up the awesomeness.”
Those four words erased any lingering traces of doubt in Vicki’s mind. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem, sir.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The hallway leading to Björn Aaberg’s hotel room was, like most of the other hallways in the Fontainebleau on this particular night, quiet. Under the circumstances that most people would refer to as “normal”, this wouldn’t mean anything particularly interesting---hallways were, after all, usually empty at this time of night, and anyone who was still lurking around, for whatever reason, probably had no logical (or legal) excuse to be there.
Of course, for Vicki Lawson, circumstances could rarely---if ever---be classified as anything that even remotely resembled “normal”.
For one, there was the matter of the maid…and the fact that her head was detatched from her body.
Again, under a different set of circumstances, Vicki having removed a maid’s head would instantly qualify as the farthest thing from “normal”---but, in a sort of twisted ironic way, this was normal for her. Her own head had been removed and reattached more than a few times, and she’d never been the worse for wear…
…though that probably had something to do with the fact that she---like the maid---was a gynoid.
“If you can hear me,” Vicki murmured to the disembodied maid’s head, “I am so sorry that I had to do this…it’s just a security precaution to make sure that you don’t got blabbing on me to Björn or anyone else.” Even as she said this, the power screwdriver in her hand threw off a spark as it hit something within the neck stump of the gynoid maid’s head. “My bad…that was completely by accident.”
As soon as she was sure that the maid wouldn’t be raising any alarms any time soon, Vicki edged her way out of the storage closet from the corridor (she wasn’t about to dismantle a maid gynoid in plain view of any paying customers) and headed for Björn’s hotel room. The meeting with “Melanie Rothschilde” was set to take place just under an hour from then, but Vicki didn’t care---she had no intention of arriving on time (or at all, for that matter), and would in fact be leaving Miami before Björn even knew what the hell was going on. Anyone else would’ve chalked it up to her feeling a shred of remorse for deactivating a feellow gynoid without her consent…
…but to be honest, it was more about her wanting (and needing) to deactivate the other security systems that were put in place to keep the lowly commoners from getting into Aaberg’s room and accessing the oh-so-vital information on his PC.
Easier than acing a physics test.
The numerical keypad/private keycard lock combo---specially installed at Björn’s request, and at considerable expense to the Fontainebleau---had been meant to stifle any attempts at breaking into the room..and, had anyone other than Vicki tried to crack the keypad, it might’ve worked. Of course, a little Detaining Grip applied into the rather sensitive keycard reader threw the built-in magnets completely out of whack, thus overriding the lock and allowing the brunette gynoid to slip into the room like a professional cat burglar (though she made a mental note to look up the origin of the term “cat burglar” after the whole thing was over with). The pressure sensors that should’ve kicked as soon as she set foot in the room were placed too far away from the door (and too far apart from each other) to make any major difference; thus, she literally tiptoed over/between them to reach the room proper…after closing and locking the door (the inside lock hadn’t been given a keypad).
So far, so good.
Nearly everything in the room that could be fitted with a lock had been---apparently, Aaberg had a lot of friends in the hotel business, and as such had been able to arrange for these “high security” locks to be installed in his room. Of course, such locks were only designed with the intention of keeping things out of reach from human thieves and intruders; in Vicki’s hands, the so-called “unbreakable” locks were safely (and quietly) clicked open thanks to the precise manipulation of their tumblers by a nifty little ALPA tool known simply as the MasterKey.
Once they were defeated, the real challenge began.
The passwords on Björn’s five laptops (two MacBooks, a Dell, an HP and one generic laptop with no badge) and the lone desktop computer (another Dell---an Inspiron that was running the already-outdated Windows Vista, at that) were almost too easy to crack, even though Björn had gone for a password far more complex than “God”, “sex” or any number of vulgar terms most in-name-only “computer savvy” types tended to fall back on. Vicki simply used a program to search out repeated phrases typed into the computer, and used the one that had been typed the most often over the past few days---“kernargfagel9962XYJ”.
I’ll admit, he’s got a pretty good password…I have a hard time picturing “kernargfagel9962XYJ” ever being used in conversation.
After the login screens faded out (big mistake, Björney---different computers should ALWAYS have different passwords), Vicki found herself confronted with a security measure that, by her standards, was actually pretty damn clever: every single file on every laptop was encrypted. The measure was intended to keep a would-be hacker busy trying to sort everything out---separating the wheat from the chaff, to use the biblical term---until the owner of the computer returned to kick the crap out of them and have hotel security haul them off…unless, of course, the aforementioned would-be hacker had the resources (and allies) available to Vicki Lawson.
Case in point: the thin tablet left for her by Richard Donnelly’s crew.
Specialized cords ran from five ports on the tablet and hooked up to each laptop in turn, running the built-in decryption programs as soon as they were connected. With the tablet doing most of the work for her as far as the laptops were concerned, Vicki turned her attention to the Inspiron…and shook her head disdainfully. She’d never really been all that fond of Dell computers, ever since that brief period of time in 2006 where her only PC had been an already-craptacular Dell Dimension L933r with an 18 gigabyte hard drive…primitive even for its day. The memory of begging Ted for a better computer---and subsequentally getting an HP desktop with hard drive space in the triple-digit gigabyte range---briefly rose to the forefront of her thoughts before she forced it aside…though not before smirking at the memory of Jamie “accidentally” dropping the L933r down a flight of stairs after it had been replaced. The only ones who’d yelled then had been the Bloombergs---aka the family that made the Brindles look like saints.
Now, on the other hand….
Vicki shook herself out of the revere and returned her attention to the Inspiron---which, to her annoyance, was already beginning to show signs of slowdown. Just like the Dimension, she grimaced, blowing out an agitated breath from between her teeth. It took a full fifteen seconds (as opposed to five) for the C Drive icon to register that it had, in fact, been clicked---I guess even Björn didn’t feel like trying to install security software on this brick---and only a bit less time for the screen to scroll down with the mouse wheel.
The annoyance that Vicki had already felt at the Inspiron only intensified when she got to the folder that (more than likely in bad humor) had been labeled “TOP SECRET”---and found that it contained nothing but the ISO files for a pirated copy of the latest Call of Duty game. Three other folders, each with imposing names, all held similarly worthless items; apparently, Björn (or one of his friends) had been having quite a bit of fun pulling an all-nighter or two on Megaupload and downloading whatever the hell they felt like getting. Over half the hard drive had already been filled with useless ISO files and bloated RAR and ZIP archives, with the rest containing pictures of Björn and various women that looked like parodies of vacation photos.
Despite her urge to smash the Inspiron to bits with her bare hands, Vicki decided against it in the end. Björn had probably let one of his suboordinates go crazy on Megaupload just to fill the hard drive…and to attract anyone who might want to get the information he felt like selling.
That, or he was planning to “give” the Inspiron to the buyer, and leave them with the proverbial empty bag.
Not exactly a great way to bolster client relations there, Björney…
With a sigh, the brunette gynoid returned her attention to the laptops and the decryption tablet.
The little gadget was doing a pretty damn good job of sorting through the files; it had already flagged the vast majority of encrypted data as old e-mails, Solitaire games and other such useless junk. In what could only be considered one hell of a backup plan, however, a select few encrypted files on each laptop were actually pieces of larger files---specifically, they were parts of a RAR archive. Vicki considered copying the files to the tablet (it had a surprisingly high storage capacity---32 gigs, to be precise), but when she noticed a display on it showing “file copy progress”, she realized the thing was already doing that task itself. Good thing Donnelly’s on my side, she mused, nodding her approval. Now, then, let’s see---
Something inside the unlocked closet moved.
Only her split-second thinking kept Vicki from blasting the living hell out of the door; she hadn’t actually opened the closet after unlocking it, mainly because she didn’t want a cavalcade of luggage falling down on her. In what could only be considered a vast stroke of luck, the laptops and tablet were all on the farthest side of the room from the closet---and close to the bed, which had just enough space underneath for Vicki to store the laptops by closing them halfway and shoving all five (with the tablet still connected) beneath the bed.
Just a few all-too-short seconds later, the closet door opened.
In a few short seconds, Vicki---who’d been mentally kicking herself as soon as she heard something moving inside the closet---realized that Björn had not, in fact, left a security drone in the closet…at least, not one that he legally owned.
Even more shocking was the fact that the figure that fell out of the closet happened to be Jake Brightstar.
“What the hell?!” The brunette gynoid managed to catch Jake just before he hit the floor; from the looks of it, he’d been shackled and left for dead by Aaberg’s cronies earlier in the day---or possibly in the week. “Jake, are you okay? Talk to me! JAKE!” Vicki lightly slapped Jake’s face, hoping to rouse him out of whatever state of unconsciousness he’d been in (be it blunt-force trauma or a drug-induced stupor). “C’mon, Jake, you’ve survived worse than this…”
After a few seconds, Jake groaned. “Steak Sauce?”
“Not even close,” Vicki teased, smiling briefly. “What the hell were you doing in Björn Aaberg’s closet?”
Jake groaned again. “Somehow, I thought I was headed for a car crusher,” he muttered. “Guess that’s what I get for trying to spy on Aaberg without checking the entire layout of the building…two of his idiots jumped me and I wasn’t able to call on any of my support crew for backup---“
“Your support crew?” Vicki echoed, arching an eyebrow.
“I’ve always sucked at doing solo work,” Jake admitted, “and Celeste agreed to lend me one or two of her more promising new recruits while the others stick to helping rebuild the House…but Aaberg’s goon squad busted up my phone before I could even think of calling them. Björn himself said he was going to drag me out to Miami Beach, stick me on a boat, fit me with a pair of cement shoes and let me sink…” He shook his head. “I don’t even know why the hell I got involved in this, Vicki.”
The brunette gynoid sighed. “At least you’re still alive,” she offered. “You’re just lucky it was me who stopped in here and unlocked the closet---Aaberg probably would’ve forgotten about you after he met with me later on tonight---“
“Met with you?!”
“Me in disguise,” Vicki clarified. “I’m posing as a representative of Anders Stahl, with a generous offer to buy information that Björn has up for sale.” She grinned again; “Seeing as how I’m copying the files to a secure storage medium right now, though,” she added, “I think that appointment has officially been cancelled---“
Jake gripped her shoulders. “No. Come back for the scheduled appointment, and let me handle Björn---“
“Jake,” Vicki breathed, “You’re a good person, and I’d be honored if you volunteered to have my back in any other situation, but PLEASE don’t try to play Lancelot here. I’m not a damsel, and I sure as hell don’t feel like I’m in any particular distress---and this is my mission, as well---so let’s just forget about who handles what, get what I came for and get the hell out of here before Aaberg comes back. I already had to dismantle a maid to keep her from alerting Aaberg---and if you say anything about recruiting her…”
“Depends on which maid you dismantled,” Jake replied, his smirk showing a glimmer of his usual bravado.
Not surprisingly, Vicki didn’t think it was all that amusing. “This isn’t the time for you to be recruiting new members to your ‘crew’, Jake,” she admonished, “and the Fontainebleau won’t take too kindly to you running off with one of their brand-new maid units. I’ll reattach her head before we leave, and erase the memory of her ‘down time’---you, meanwhile, will be on your way to the ground floor via the elevator, and take the cab that’ll be waiting out front to---JAKE, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!”
Even as she’d been talking to him, Jake---now wearing a weird sort of backpack---was making his way towards the window. “Sorry, Vicki,” he called out, “but I’ve got plans of my own.” He grinned as he opened the window and stood on the ledge; “BE SEEING YOU!”
“Jake, don’t---“ Vicki’s protest came too late, as Jake jumped out the window; the gynoid ran over, dreading what she was about to see---
---and, upon seeing what had happened to Jake, instantly wanted to punch him in the middle of his face.
The backpack had dissolved (for lack of a better term) to reveal a complex mechancial setup that, upon first glance, looked completely useless…until the two “arms” resting at its side folded up and out, the nozzles at the end spurting to life like miniature jet engines. Even as he soared unsteadily towards another building, Jake was whooping it up the whole time, laughing as the crude-but-effective jetpack carried him off.
“That clever little prick,” Vicki muttered, her pissed-off mood giving way to an impressed smile.
A few minutes later, with the laptops back out from under the bed, the gynoid Field Agent was piecing together the RAR archive from the bits saved to the tablet---and instantly found herself hating Björn Aaberg even more than she already did. The hit list she’d called the ALPA about earlier was there, along with vague mockups for an Epsilon Mk II…but what truly stirred the gynoid’s ire was a list of “clients”, followed by an identical list of “targets”---both of which included names of prominent ALPA and Coalition company heads and researchers, as well as unaffiliated benefactors for organizations on both sides of the coin. Stahl’s name was on both lists in the “maybe” column, meaning that Aaberg was either going to take him on as a permanent client…
…or terminate their working relationship in a far-too permanent manner.
Apart from the “target/client” lists, Aaberg had been keeping a running tab on various factors whereever he stayed, with the most noticable being a list of potential “new girls” for his ever-growing entourage. Many of the names listed for Miami were gynoids working at the Fontainebleau---including the maid who’d been taken down by Vicki a little under an hour ago---and several others had ALPA database numbers…including at least five sleepers in close proximity to the Fontainebleau.
The fact that “Melanie Rothschilde” was the newest entry on the Miami list really didn’t help.
I am so going to enjoy watching Aaberg get hauled off for this, Vicki mused, shutting off all five laptops and disconnecting them from the tablet. If the ALPA could use the info she’d gathered to build a case against Björn and connect him to whatever the hell the Maestro had been doing---
Oh, SCRAP!
All feelings of triumph faded instantly as soon as Vicki realized her colossal error---she’d completely forgotten to follow up any leads on why Matthew Hannsen had come to Miami. Nearly everything she’d just done had been for nothing---
Wait a minute.
Her attention turned, once again, to the Inspiron (which she hadn’t bothered to shut down), and the hard drive loaded with useless crap…except it might not be useless crap, she realized. Aaberg’s encryption trick had already been used on the laptops, to great effect; what if each and every bit of “bloatware” on the Inspiron was hiding other files as well?
Might as well give it a shot…
Vicki checked every archive file, regardless of format, size or seeming insignificance---and, just a few minutes later, shook her head in disbelief. Once again, Björn had gone for the strategy of hiding stuff in plain sight by putting vital information and files inside otherwise worthless archives, most of which had been obtained using methods of dubious legality. Had the police or any other authority found the tons of junk he’d downloaded, the files would’ve simply been deleted---and the important data would’ve been erased with them…or worse, those same files would’ve been noticed by a curious computer repair shop employee (or any number of other people tasked with cleaning up the PC) and mentioned to said employee’s superiors…
…and I don’t even want to think of how bad things could get from there.
Despite all prior training and being told never to even think of removing a critical piece of evidence from what was obviously a crime scene (last time I checked, locking an unconcsious person in a closet did, in fact, count as kidnapping them), Vicki realized that she just didn’t have enough time to go through the files stored on the Inspiron’s hard drive and put the pieces together one by one.
She’d have to take the damn thing with her.
A quick check of her internal chronometer revealed that it was just hitting 9:30 at that moment; if the computer in question was anything other than a Dell Inspiron with a half-filled hard drive, she would’ve been more than happy to sit there and zip through its contents without a care in the world…but the recalcitrant Inspiron was already demonstrating why that idea would’ve been tantamount to suicide. Even with just seven windows open (I’d blame it on Psycho McCrazyMask if he wasn’t still chained to a hospital bed), the stupid thing was taking its sweet time to load---and thanks to the delay between her clicking on things and them actually reacting, windows were being minimized and maximized at a semi-random pace, which did absolutely nothing to improve Vicki’s mood. She almost yelled “WORK, YOU STUPID PIECE OF CRAP!”, before remembering that more than a few of the Fontainebleau’s guests were probably asleep by now.
The Hell with this…
With all the grace of a predatory jungle cat, Vicki ripped one side panel off of the Inspiron and grabbed the hard drive, plucking it free from its moorings. The monitor connected to the Inspiron blanked out, while the cooling fan chose that moment to sputter and die. Not my problem, the brunette gynoid reminded herself. I just need to get out of here with the hard drive before anyone else shows up…and this is usually the part where the door opens right after I say “before anyone else shows up”, so I need to leave now!
After re-locking everything (including the closet), returning the laptops to where she’d found them, and turning the Inspiron to face away from the door (not that it mattered---Björn would see how damaged it was soon enough), Vicki headed for the window---and, just like at the LadyKiller, spotted a bus parked outside.
Here goes nothing…
With one final look back at Björn’s hotel room, she leapt from the window.
The impact with the roof of the bus didn’t exactly hurt---Vicki’s upgrades effectively nullified the shock and left her physically undamaged---but only her quick thinking allowed her to land on her feet---if she’d gone for the “cannonball” approach, the hard drive and tablet would’ve shattered in her grasp.
At least I got back before Björn got back to the hotel room…
Twenty minutes later, in a room at the Eden Roc reserved for Melanie Rothschilde (Vicki had paid for the room to keep Aaberg or anyone else who might be tailing her from figuring out “Melanie’s” true intentions), Vicki stared at the computer screen that the Inspiron’s hard drive had been hooked up to. She’d expected to find a second set of lists hidden away within the pirated games and bootlegged movies, or some new version of the Stylo virus; part of her even expected to find A.I.s from ALPA or Coalition companies.
What she found instead…was horrifying beyond words.
Every single file she’d found hidden in the RAR, ZIP and BIN archives had the security stamp carried by all data from Project Apollo---the same carte blanche program that, back in the dark ages of the 1980s, had given Ted Lawson the resources necessary to create the Variable Industrial Cybernetic Implement, later changed to the Voice Input Cybernetic Identicant….aka V.I.C.I….aka Vicki herself. That, however, wasn’t what sent the chill down her titanium-carbon spine, or what gave her that all-too-familiar sinking feeling somewhere in the pit of the chemically-treated sac within her abdomen that served as her stomach.
That honor went to the timestamp on each file….a timestamp dated July 30, 2011.
Project Apollo…is still active?!
Ted had told her that the project was shut down, that it had been written off in 1990 due to budget problems and “other stuff”….so why in the hell was the Maestro stealing data for it?!
“Chills the blood, doesn’t it?”
Vicki almost flinched at the sound of Hannsen’s voice coming from the computer she’d hooked the Inspiron’s hard drive up to. “Where did you get all this data?” she droned, her voice sounding toneless even to her own ears. “Project Apollo has been---“
“Carried on in secret, under the watchful eyes of the Artificial Lifeform Protection Agency,” Hannsen replied, “in every city and every nation from Lake Geneva to---wait, no….that’s ‘West End Girls’, sorry. ANYWAY, as I was saying before my train of thought momentarily derailed, Project Apollo is, in fact, still being worked on to this very day, no matter how many government-sponsored loonies will try to tell you otherwise. More to the point, I’m more than a bit surprised that you didn’t comment on what was in those files….”
The only reason Vicki hadn’t, in fact, commented on what was in the files was the fact that the images she was looking at were either part of someone’s sick joke…or something straight out of any nightmare that didn’t involve Faceless.
“Go ahead,” Hannsen whispered. “Why don’t you start with that rather large PDF file…”
Despite the sting of artificial tears in her eyes, Vicki read the name of the file. “V.I.C.I. Mk III Schematics.”
Hannsen’s chuckle rang in her ears like dice in a cup. “See, I’d really love to tell you that those were from last month---after Little Billy Rengold tried to turn you into robo-kebab, but they’re actually from ’93---seems old Teddy Boy was planning a major retrofit that he never got to work on.” He gave a disappointed sigh; “Oh, I’d love to have seen the look on your face when you read that file name,” he taunted. “Still, the fact remains: if ANY of these files got leaked, a lot of people would be in a LOT of---“
“No.”
“A lot of ‘no’? Sorry, but even by my standards, that doesn’t---“
“You’re not going to leak the files. You’re going to delete them from this hard drive, and then you’re going to---“
“I’M not going to do ANYTHING unless I FEEL LIKE DOING IT!” Hannsen barked. “You don’t seem to get the picture, ‘Agent Lawson’, so allow me to spell it out: YOU HAVE NOTHING TO THREATEN ME WITH! I’m already in prison, and thanks to a few well-planned ‘mishaps’, it’s not like anyone’s just going to burst into my cell and shank me to death in the middle of the night!” His shouting degenerated into a deranged giggle. “This never gets old,” he sighed blissfully. “Watching you so-called professionals just break down…”
V.I.C.I. fought the urge to punch the screen. “What do you want from me, Hannsen?”
“Now that is a good question…and luckily for you, I happen to have quite a good answer. What I want from you is for you to not go to Havana, Cuba, as originally planned---and yes, I happen to know all about your itenerary for the week, so don’t bother trying to puzzle over it---and instead book a flight to Athens, Greece, where you’ll be getting the full scoop on my itenerary. As much as I enjoy watching you fumble about in the dark, trying to figure out why I went where I did when I slipped the leash, seeing you cock about trying to get on Aaberg’s computer just sort of takes all the fun out of it. I want action, and drama…not this boring---“
“I’M NOT DOING ANY OF THIS FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT!” V.I.C.I. snapped.
Her anger only prompted more derisive laughter from the Maestro. “Oh-ho, so the girl finally grows a spine and fights back, does she? Pretty funny stuff, especially considering your track record…I really thought you’d have learned to mind your manners around your betters, Lawson---“
“YOU’RE NOT MY ‘BETTER’, HANNSEN!”
Hannsen’s voice dropped to a positively venomous leer. “Care to bet on that….Vicki?”
Even with her fists clenched and poised to smash the monitor, the brunette gynoid knew that breaking her own PC out of rage would do nothing to help her beat Hannsen. “This isn’t Vegas, Hannsen,” she murmured. “I don’t bet unless---“
“Unless you know you can win? Good call…except this time, you can’t---“
“I don’t bet unless I know everything about who I’m up against…even a common thief like you.”
Hannsen’s laugh faded out. “A common thief?!” On the other end of the line (probably in his prison cell, Vicki reminded herself), the criminal mastermind drew in a quick, annoyed breath; after a few seconds of silence, he exhaled, sounding noticably calmer. “For your information,” he drawled, “there is nothing ‘common’ about what I do. My skills are legendary in certain circles---yours obviously not included---and to be quite honest, I don’t know if you’re even worthy of trying to figure out what it was I did during my all-too-brief freedom---“
“This isn’t about me being worthy,” Vicki shot back, “or any of your other stupid crappy excuses. This is about you being brought to justice---“
“Already been there,” Hannsen drawled. “The only black mark on my otherwise perfect record.”
Somewhere within Vicki’s mind, the smallest sliver of that old, dark desire---wanting to kill someone---began to rise…only to be quickly buried again. “Your record is as far from perfect as humanly possible, Hannsen,” she calmly replied. “You’ve made mistakes before---just like you’re making them now. Letting Aaberg handle your data was the biggest screw-up you’ve made up to now…”
A smirk played at her features. “…and something tells me you’re going to top yourself before the week ends.”
Hannsen’s answering chuckle was dry, humorless and damn near acidic. “If you’re so dead-set on seeing me fail,” he sneered, “then maybe you should call up your friends and tell them to just break down my cell door and put me out of my misery forever…unless you want to keep the chase going.”
“Oh, I really do,” Vicki beamed. “To be honest, Hannsen, this whole thing is actually sort of…dare I say…fun.”
Silence.
With a derisive chuckle, Vicki turned off the computer connected to the Inspiron’s hard drive. Though her face showed calmness that Bhuddist monks would find admirable, her thoughts were a veritable typhoon---rage, guilt, fear and nearly every other emotion that could possibly drag her down coursed through every single circuit within her CPU, all of them nearly deafening in their intensity…
…but not nearly loud enough to drown out the knocking on her door.
“Miss Rothschilde? Miss Rothschilde, are you here?”
A few seconds worth of concentration allowed Vicki to assume the Liverpudlian accent she’d sported earlier in the day. “Yes?”
“This is Björn Aaberg….we met at the Fontainbleau this morning. May I---“
“NO! I….I, ah, I’m not decent…just got out of the bath….” Damn, damn, damn, why is he here, right now….
“….my apologies, Miss Rothschilde. I simply dropped by to tell you that---with great regret on my own part---I must cancel our meeting to discuss the sale of information to Mister Stahl. Someone has broken into my hotel room and seen fit to vandalize my personal property…I believe they may have also stolen something of mine.”
“Stolen what?” Vicki blurted, still using Melanie’s voice.
The drawn-out sigh that answered her question proved her suspicions all too well. “I believe that a young man who was…attempting to obsevre my activities earlier today may have absconded with the hard drive containing data---the same data, in fact, that I was going to sell to Mister Stahl. I’ve heard some rather remarkable stories about someone jumping out of the window of my room with…” Aaberg chuckled. “…a jetpack, if such tales can be believed…but the description of the so-called rocketeer matches that of this would-be spy.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Vicki asked, hoping to give the impression that Melanie Rothschilde would be more than happy to accommodate Aaberg by arranging another sale (or at the very least reimbursing him for the stolen data).
“I’m afraid not…but Mister Stahl has assured me that you will not be reprimanded despite the failure to acquire the data. He was upset at the news of the theft, of course…the police are doing their best to apprehend the fool who broke into my suite, and seeing as how the data is rather…sensitive…I do not wish to involve more people than those who are already investigating this…admittedly heinous affair.” A muttered Norweigian curse word punctuated the sentence…
…followed by what was, unmistakeably, an oath against “Brightstar”.
He thinks Jake did this?! Vicki neary gasped. It wasn’t too farfetched of a plan, to be honest; Aaberg had left Jake chained up in the closet, most likely “sure” that he couldn’t escape…only to return to his room and find the Inspiron missing its hard drive, and the closet locked---but missing its occupant.
“I’m sorry I can’t do more to assist you with this matter,” she told Aaberg. “If there’s anything I can do…”
“I appreciate the offer, Miss Rothschilde,” Aaberg replied wearily, “but I must be going.”
With that, Aaberg (and at least three bodyguards) moved away from the door; Vicki’s enhanced hearing picked up every muttered swearword and oath as they trudged down the hall, promising swift and painful vengeance against “the one called Brightstar”.
All at once, the feelings of self-loathing, fear and rage subsided, but the guilt still remained---stronger than before, this time. “They think Jake did it,” she muttered. “They think Jake broke out of their room with the hard drive…” It wasn’t exactly a stretch of the imagination for her to realize what was going on---Jake, flying away in a jetpack and laughing like a fool, had caught the attention of the crowds below far more than some girl jumping onto a bus---
---except the crowd should’ve noticed that the girl jumping onto a bus didn’t so much jump as she fell….
…and that she’d landed on her feet.
“They were ignoring me,” Vicki realized. “They all heard it, but…they didn’t react at all---“
“Surprised?”
Oberon’s voice in her ear nearly prompted a scream from the brunette gynoid. “What…how did you---“
“You’re not the only one who took a red-eye flight to Miami,” the ALPA Chairman informed her. “That crowd of random people near the bus---the same crowd that saw Jake Brightstar flying off into the night---were all ALPA operatives from the local office. No gynoids or androids---otherwise Björn might’ve suspected something---and all of them told that if two people went flying out of the window, ignore the second one….and for the record, I know that Aaberg is after Jake now---“
“So you’re not going to do anything to help him?!”
“We’ll get him out of the state and as far away from Aaberg’s people as possible. After that, he’s on his own.”
Vicki sighed. “The Maestro contacted me after I hooked the Inspiron’s hard drive up to one of the laptops here; apparently, he wants me to go to Greece---“
“Then we’ll get you on the first flight there tomorrow morning. Havana’s a bit…busy this time of year, and we don’t want to risk bringing you to Singapore quite yet---some SPS-style attacks have put the local ALPA branch on edge, and we’re trying to get that sorted out before we start anything else there….on a completely different note, what exactly was on that Inspiron hard drive---“
“Project Apollo data. Current Project Apollo data.”
A pause… “Vicki, you must understand something---“
“I’ll understand it when I get back from Greece,” the brunette gynoid interjected. “Right now, I want to make damn sure that Matthew Hannsen is punished for every single stupid thing he’s done…the Project Apollo thing can keep until I’m back in San Jose.”
She could sense Oberon’s smile as he replied. “Couldn’t have put it better myself. Oh, and Vicki?”
“Yeah?”
“I think I’d be remiss in my duties if I ended this call without giving you some sound advice for the journey ahead, so even though this goes without saying, I thought I might as well pass along this little kernel of wisdom anyways….keep up the awesomeness.”
Those four words erased any lingering traces of doubt in Vicki’s mind. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem, sir.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elvis Lives. Not in this timeline, but in quite a few others.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
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DukeNukem 2417
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Re: The V.I.C.I. Diaries: A Criminal Mind Part 3
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The story that follows "A Criminal Mind" will be shorter than this, due to unforseen delays and other crap that I've had to deal with.
Oh, and I MIGHT be creating a VICI-pedia, as LongTimeLurker suggested, later on this year.
PART FOUR COMING TOMORROW AFTERNOON.
Oh, and I MIGHT be creating a VICI-pedia, as LongTimeLurker suggested, later on this year.
PART FOUR COMING TOMORROW AFTERNOON.
Elvis Lives. Not in this timeline, but in quite a few others.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
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DollSpace
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Re: The V.I.C.I. Diaries: A Criminal Mind Part 3
Brillant action sequences in this one, and we're beginning to turn up suspense level closer and closer to 11. 
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DukeNukem 2417
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Re: The V.I.C.I. Diaries: A Criminal Mind Part 3
Due to circumstances beyond my control, Part Four will have to wait until tomorrow morning.
Oh, and I HATE DELL COMPUTERS.
Oh, and I HATE DELL COMPUTERS.
Elvis Lives. Not in this timeline, but in quite a few others.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.
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Brytestar
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Re: The V.I.C.I. Diaries: A Criminal Mind Part 3
Sorry about your computer Duke. As for the feedback for the latest part....
FIELD GOAL! I want to see how it ends in Greece. I hope you feel better.
FIELD GOAL! I want to see how it ends in Greece. I hope you feel better.
Sometimes you just gotta look at the Bryte side!
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