Even Lions Have Their Pride, Chapter 18

18.
Offsite

Sometimes, when you’re scared, the only thing to do is nothing. Ask any prey animal.

You freeze in place. You don’t move, don’t make a sound, wait for the danger to pass and hope its vision is movement-based like a mythical T-Rex. Maybe, if you just stay still, the calamity will pass you by.

Sometimes it even works.

It’s been a week.

I haven’t set foot in Niko’s club since the night he betrayed us, but I have gotten out. A little. When cabin fever got bad. The neighborhood around Niko’s safe house is shit. No wonder it was so easy for his wife to have the cops stage a raid on our downstairs neighbors.

Half the people I ran into wanted to sell me illegal shit, none of it even a little bit interesting. The other half wanted to buy my time.

What, exactly, about baggy cargo pants, a sweatshirt, and messy hair says “fuck me” to a man? Seriously.

Only one of the guys was persistent. So I asked his advice. I rattled off a bunch of the symptoms from those PSAs about Slam City Syph and asked if he knew why I’d been having them since I hooked up with a guy down the block. That was the end of the smooth moves from him.

Mostly I just stay in, though. I’ll have to start really crawling the walls before I hit that street again.

It’s not like I have nothing to do. Riddick has been pretty insistent about me completing my GGED, so I took the last test I need to qualify two days ago. I told him it’s not like I can’t just make a diploma appear if I need one, but he says that’s not the point. I can get the forged documents just fine, but not the actual knowledge behind them. So he’s made me study for all the tests, and mostly it’s cool but some of the “classical literature” is just gross.

But that’s done, anyway. The rest of my focus has been on the latest GBI cracks and patches. I’m getting closer, but I still can’t break into their system without risk of detection. Once I can, though, I’ll be within shouting distance of destroying Riddick’s biometric data. Forever.

Then he’ll really be free of all the old charges, and nobody will ever be able to prove he didn’t die in the Hunter-Gratzner crash. Then he’ll finally be safe… as safe as anyone in our line of work can be, anyway.

Two of the ways I figured I might go in just got discovered and shuttered. So I’m exploring new routes that others are pioneering, but at least one of those pioneers just got arrested, so I’m being extra careful. Can’t have anybody figuring out where Hackerjack nests.

Speaking of which, Niko’s security systems have been totally rebuilt from the ground up. All my old tendrils are gone, but that’s not unexpected. So I’ve been working on burrowing my way back into there, too. I have to be careful not to let Rat see me doing it. I don’t want to put him at risk. He’ll have to stop me if he spots me—for all he’ll know, the intruder is really Niko testing him—so I just can’t let him see any sign of me. Maybe once Riddick figures out what hold Niko has on him, and breaks it, that won’t be an issue.

Or maybe I can find that out.

The more I know about Rat, after all, the better a sense I can get of how he’ll recode things and how I can sneak in. Not that there aren’t handles sticking out no matter what, but he’ll have booby-trapped the obvious ones. He has to. Niko thinks I outgunned his best black-hat, so he has to play the part of the cowed, loyal lackey or he’s dead. Which means right now he has to atone.

Better on your knees than in the river, though.

I’m not making that shit up, either. They fish bodies out of there practically every day. People who got on Niko’s wrong side. Two nights ago, it was Dave Sampson. I guess he got caught pushing on campus and tried to flip. Dumb move. Half the cops are on Niko’s payroll.

Either that or Niko killed him for hitting on me that night. As if he had any more of a chance than Mister Papadopoulos does.

Riddick says there have been a lot of shakeups on Niko’s staff. Mostly people who were in a position to know about the double-cross. Suddenly they’re vacationing in the country. More likely the river. The only bodies that float to the surface are the ones that are meant as warnings. The rest… well, according to Riddick, there’s a whole necropolis out where it’s at its deepest.

I only drink bottled water since he told me that.

My new palmtop is spinning through possible locations to insert a tendril. I had a wild hair earlier and decided to see if I could find some of Rat’s new tendrils into city services and follow them home. Took maybe twenty minutes to find a handful of them. I have four left to try, and then it’ll be on to the next brainstorm. Except that I have a green light on my screen, which means I may have just gotten in.

I enter the system carefully. It could be a fake, like the overlay that briefly fooled me during the heist. Something designed to catch me. I’m pretty sure Rat will let me go if he can, but that’s a big if. From what Riddick’s said, Niko is paranoid as hell right now—like it’s anyone’s fault but his that he betrayed one of his best wetworks men and got the rest of them killed in the process—and is looking over everybody’s shoulder.

But the system is the real deal. I insert a tendril, and then a backup in another part of the code. And now I go exploring.

The gun emplacements have been reworked. All the cameras are in new positions, too. Smart moves. Niko’s wife is holding court at one of the tables in the inner sanctum. Ginger’s sitting with her, along with three or four other women who have that same kept look. I grab a screen shot of them. I need to know more about her, who her friends are, what she’s into. Don’t want her trying to kill me again.

Don’t want her succeeding.

A lot of regulars are missing. The rest have a strange mixture of looks to them. Some are on edge, obviously wondering if another shoe’s dropping soon, this one on their heads. Others are newly promoted and you can tell. They’re both cocky and grateful, too excited about having made the big time to wonder what happened to their predecessors to open up a space.

Riddick is sitting with some guys I vaguely recognize. One of them, I think, worked for Autrichien the last time we passed through his territory. The other was on Ballard’s payroll back in the day. Contract killers. Niko’s putting together a new wetworks team. Interesting that he’s picking former colleagues of Riddick’s. To set him at ease? Or in the hopes that they know his habits and can use them against him?

Or maybe, at this point, I’ve just met all the killers for hire out there and anyone he recruits will be someone I’ve already met through Riddick.

Fuck, I wish we could just get off this rock.

I poke around for a while longer. Rat’s working in his little office. It takes me a while to sneak into his system. I send my little sailor and his dog to visit him.

He sends them back to me with rat faces. Nice. I send a piece of cheese his way.

We “talk” for a while like that. I put a few more tendrils in, one or two just for show so he can find them and prove what a loyal guy he is to Niko by destroying them.

And… I find my way into his inner system. He doesn’t seem to notice, still focusing on our game of rat and mouse. And finally I know what I’ve needed to all this time.

He has a brother. Or, to be more accurate, Niko has his brother.

The kid’s at a boarding school. They communicate regularly but they haven’t been allowed to see each other in person in more than a year. Niko’s made sure he can’t find out which school it is. Assuming it’s really a school at all.

The rest of Rat’s family is dead. It’s pretty clear he suspects Niko, but what can he do about it with his little brother a living hostage?

I’m still working the problem when Riddick comes home. He walks over and sits down next to me, looking over my shoulder at my screen.

“Boarding schools? You’ll be getting your GGED any day now, you know.”

“Well,” I tell him, “it’s like you said. I can fake a diploma but not the knowledge behind it. Maybe I need to enroll in an all-boys’ school to complete my education.”

He snorts. But doesn’t ask.

“Rat’s little brother is being kept in one of them. I think. He thinks he’s at a boarding school, anyway.”

“Hmm.” Riddick nods. “Complicated. If I go get the kid, we’ll have to time things just right. ’Cause the second I move, Niko might move on Rat.”

“And the second he thinks Rat’s turned on him, the kid gets hurt. Maybe dead.” I lean my head back against Riddick’s shoulder for a moment.

Things are mostly okay between us now. For a value of “okay” that means nothing’s changed. We’re just staying still and hoping calamity passes us by.

“There’s probably also a Scorched Earth clause in there, too,” Riddick says after a moment. “Anything happens to Niko, probably all his hostages go down in flames with him.”

There’s a nasty thought. “How many do you think he has?”

“Ain’t all that many reasonably honest people in his outfit,” Riddick muses after a moment. “He’s got a galaxy-class chef on his club’s staff. Some musicians who oughtta be rakin’ it in on a bigger stage. Maybe you should check on them, too.”

“I will.” It’s a sobering thought. If we have to take Niko down, he’s made sure random innocents we don’t even know about will suffer.

You’d think a contract killer wouldn’t care about such things. You’d be wrong.

I keep digging while he makes dinner. I only take a break while we eat and he verifies that the things I’ve seen in the club’s feeds are accurate, and I fill him in on where all the new gun emplacements are.

By the time we’re ready to sleep, I know he’s right about the hostages. Niko has at least five. They’re all kids, like Rat’s little brother. All in a “boarding school.” Nobody enrolled in any of the real schools in the area is a match. But the vid feeds are local.

My dreams, all night, are about finding them. Could be worse. When I wake up, I have a bunch of new ideas to try.

And not just where the kids are concerned.

Offsite storage. That’s the phrase that kept popping up in one of my dreams. Feels like it has to do with both of my puzzles.

Somewhere out there, there are physical copies of Riddick’s biometrics and little bits of DNA connected to him. If I wipe out the GBI files on him, they can be reconstituted from those. I need to find them first. Wipe them away.

The Marines have some of it. That’ll be almost as hard to get to as the GBI stuff, but it’s in my crosshairs now. There are a few dozen civilian crime scenes on different worlds where his jobs went sour enough that some DNA got left behind. I don’t care about prints; he’s had those changed. But his cells are telltales he can’t get away from.

By early afternoon, I have a list. All the places where those original bits are stored. The exact locations in the different filing systems. And I’ve made a new friend.

Kaz Trifari specializes in mementos. I’m probably not the first person to hire him like this, but apparently I’m the first “Riddick fan” he’s been hired by. Good. None of the evidence has already gone out into the wild where it might resurface later.

I pretend I’m a PhD candidate from New Eton. He pretends, along with me, that my desire for stolen evidence is about my dissertation and not a dirty little kink. I “accidentally” drop a few hints that I might be collecting the DNA, as many samples as possible, because I want to have a dead convict’s baby. Or maybe even raise his clone. Whichever sounds more mental.

There’s probably somebody out there who’d really want to do that, too. Have “Big Evil’s” baby. Me? I’m protected. Got another ten years to go before I re-up the protection, too. Some days I suspect it’ll outlive me.

But by the time Riddick leaves for the club, even if I haven’t made any progress on the hostage front, I’ve seen to it that, over the next few weeks, thirty-seven different jurisdictions on almost as many planets are going to lose key pieces of physical evidence. My bank account is nearly empty when I’m done, but Kaz is legit and it’s worth it. I’ve set up a drop location, renting a box for the next five years, where all of it will be sent. It’s on a station we pass through sometimes; once all of it arrives, and I can confirm it’s everything, I’ll have it all destroyed. Then there will only be digital records, and the stuff that the Marine Corps has.

Replenishing my bank account, wishing I could be brassy enough to just steal right from Niko, gets me thinking about money trails.

See, if he’s running some kind of pretend boarding school and keeping a bunch of kids hostage in it, there’s a whole lot he has to pay for, right? Kids eat. He’d need to own or rent a place to keep them. There’s furniture, equipment, supplies that go with that. And if he’s gonna sell the whole “school” angle, there have to be some teachers on his staff, too. Maybe they’re dirty or maybe he’s got them fooled. But I’ve seen the vid conversations between the kids and their family members, the ones Niko is holding down with them. They believe they’re in a school. That means he’s put some money into the charade.

It’s impressive just how deep you can get into financial systems, undetected, as long as you’re not trying to steal anything. Or at least, how deep I can get into them.

It’s a good thing I have a head for numbers because Niko has a whole lot of cooked books and is doing a fuckton of money laundering through his accounts. It obscures the trail, but not for too long.

Okay. Yes. For too long. I forgot to have lunch. I realize that when my hands start shaking and I have to take a break to eat… and that’s when I notice that it’s almost dusk. Dinner’s still a few hours away, though. Riddick and I tend to eat late. I won’t spoil my appetite.

But I’ve found them. Offsite storage indeed.

All the teachers are there because Niko has a hold on them. They all have gambling addictions and have ended up deep in the hole to him. They think he did them a favor, agreeing to forgive their debts if they came to work in his “exclusive” boarding school for “select” children. They know they can’t ask questions. And they don’t realize that he pulled them into the hole, in the first place, so he could recruit them.

Eight teachers, fifteen kids. If they weren’t all hostages, that’d be one hell of an enviable student-teacher ratio, wouldn’t it? My sixth grade class had thirty kids in it. And we all lived in fear of our Principal’s big wooden paddle.

The facility’s tricked out like someone read way too many magical boarding school series. The kids can’t go outside, but the indoor facilities are top rate. They have a “fitness center” complete with P.E. teacher, classrooms, labs, a music room, and an art room… goddamn, I’m envying them a little.

Gold-plating a cage doesn’t make it any less of a cage. I have to tell myself that over and over as I review the layout. And then force myself to stop imagining playing in those rooms and dig into the security specs.

It’s bad.

Breaking into the place is possible. But it’s going to be tough. And both administrators are Niko’s people through-and-through, with orders to kill both the kids and their teachers if he goes down or the place gets raided. Riddick will have to kill them first, and fast.

He comes home as I’m finishing up my report package.

“Perfect timing,” I tell him as he walks in. He just raises an eyebrow and starts disarming.

Damn. He only packs that much when he’s on assignment.

“I found the kids.”

“Hmm.” He starts changing, tossing his discarded clothes into the bin for the incinerator. Someone must have gotten their DNA evidence on him. He’s painstakingly careful about the reverse, given what even one drop of blood, one cell, one hair follicle, could tell the galaxy about him.

That’s the real reason he shaves his head. He was convicted of one of his early crimes because a victim managed to pull out, and hold onto, some of his hair, which will be on its way to my drop box soon. He’s made sure there’ll never be a repeat of that.

“There’s a decommissioned factory near the river,” I say after a moment of trying not to watch him undress. “Looks totally normal, just another rotting old building, but inside it, there’s a fortress. Twenty-three hostages, including the teachers. Two guards of Niko’s, playing at being Principal and Vice-Principal. Top line security.”

“How many kids?” Riddick might not especially care about the fates of the adults in the mix, even those who are hostages too, but he has that big soft spot for kids.

“Fifteen. They think they’re attending some real-life Hogwarts. For, you know, normal people.” There’s a word for that in the books but damned if I can remember what it is. It’s been like seven years since I read them and I was only allowed to read the first three. My teacher told me they were a trilogy, and I didn’t know any better until I got my GGED reading list.

“How many employees under Niko’s thumb does that come out to?” Riddick asks, mercifully pulling on a shirt.

“Twelve. I have a list of which ones.” I even made a hard copy. I bring it over to him.

Two accountants, five musicians, two chefs, an architect, a fashion designer, and Rat. Galaxy-class talent that was too rich for Niko to buy, but which he could steal.

Riddick glances over it, nodding. “Good to know. I’ve wondered about a few of them. Explains a lot.”

Yeah. Those are twelve people who, no matter what situation they’re put in or how out of character their resulting behavior might be, have to respond in ways that won’t get their kids killed. And most of them, if they got word of an attempted coup against Niko, no matter how much they wanted it to succeed, would still report it to him in the hopes of getting out from under his thumb as a reward, or at least not getting their kids killed.

“This is good,” Riddick says after a moment. I follow him to the kitchen and lean against a counter, watching him gather ingredients for dinner. Niko has no idea that he has a third galaxy-class chef working for him in a totally different capacity. “I want the security specs. Everything you can get. The sooner I can strike it, the better.”

“How come?”

Most people just use an appliance to slice up vegetables for them. The knife in Riddick’s hand is almost a blur as he chops a carrot up into perfectly cut slices, all exactly the same thickness. If knives have a god, I’m in the same room with him right now. “I’m pretty sure Niko’s planning something. The man don’t learn. I figure sometime in the next two weeks, I’m gonna have to take him out.”

He sweeps the carrots into a bowl and reaches for a leek. I have no idea what he’s making but I’m already looking forward to eating it. “So we’ll get the kids to safety first?” I ask.

I thought Rat had asked Riddick to beat him up so that he wouldn’t end up in the river. The whole time, it was so his brother wouldn’t get fished out of it.

“Yeah.” Riddick glances over at me. “Gonna be a bloodbath when it all happens.”

He doesn’t look bothered by that. There’s a hint of anticipation in his expression, even. I wonder if he gets nostalgic about the Wailing War.

“A dozen fewer people I have to kill in there,” he adds, surprising me, “wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

Posted on the 25^th anniversary of the theatrical release of Pitch Black, February 18, 2025.