The Changeling Game, Chapter 42

42.
A Growing Stack of Felonies

Jack didn’t bother keeping a discreet distance between herself and Eve Logan as she shadowed the merc. There was no need. She was, after all, in Elsewhere as she did it. It was more fun that way, hiking practically by Logan’s side; she got to hear everything the merc was muttering as she walked.

“Idiot! Absolute idiot! He’s gonna get us kicked off this planet… not that I’d be sad to leave this teetotaler shithole…”

Only when Logan hurried up the flight of steps that led to New Marrakesh’s courthouse did Jack stay behind; there were no such steps in Elsewhere for her to climb. It didn’t matter too much; she knew exactly what the merc was doing inside.

Her honey trap had caught Toombs; now Logan had to bail him out of jail.

Kyra had stayed back at the ait Meziane house, not wanting to be a phantom attendee of a party that had, originally, been clandestinely in her honor. She intended to spend the evening-day researching other opportunities that could replace the one she had lost, and that her false ID qualified her for. But Jack hadn’t been able to stay away.

She had begun worrying about the four women she’d thrown into Toombs’ path too much to just let everything play out without watching. Elsewhere and U1 were similar enough in terrain—most places—that following everyone back to the garden, invisibly, hadn’t been hard at all. She’d felt like the star of one of the Ginny Lane, Kid Spy novels she’d voraciously devoured at the age of nine as she did it. Ginny’s cases would have been so much easier if she could have conducted surveillance from another universe. She wouldn’t have needed so much of the tech Audrey’s father had insisted didn’t actually exist.

She had antigravity shoes, which don’t exist, but never once used a Master Key, which does… huh. Of course, using a Master Key was a felony. Jack had, months ago, already discovered how different adventures were in reality, compared to those safe, sanitized books where every case was solved, and every caper foiled, within a hundred pages.

The party hadn’t even begun yet. The grotto was still being set up by the garden’s regular staff. Cedric was greeting men and women in military uniforms outside of the garden complex itself and directing them inside. Apparently, among the officers Tomlin had served with, early was on time, on time was late, and there was absolutely nothing fashionable about being late. The wait staff was still arriving, intermingled with the officers they would soon be serving, when one of the four waitresses Jack had added hurried up to Cedric… and Toombs pounced.

It was one of the two who looked a great deal like Kyra, technically not even his bounty as much as Logan’s. In person, the resemblance was even more uncanny, although the woman had straight black hair and bangs instead of Kyra’s wild, dark brown tangle. But Kyra had been wearing a long, black wig with bangs at Tomlin’s memorial, when Toombs and Logan had gotten a brief look at her and been told she was Ewan’s cousin Dihya. The waitress was almost at the entryway, and had begun asking Cedric in Arabic if she was late, when Toombs emerged from concealment between two ornamental topiaries and grabbed her from behind.

“Ain’t happenin’, Miss Wittier-Collins,” he said, grasping the crown of her hair and pulling as if to remove a wig. “You’re comin’ with me, an’ you’re gonna tell me where your friends—”

The waitress, who hadn’t understood a word of what Toombs was saying—none of the women Jack had hired spoke English—obligingly picked that moment to scream.

Within seconds, Toombs was surrounded by several active members of Tangiers Prime’s military service and the two off-duty police officers Cedric had asked to join the event. While Tafrara comforted the disheveled waitress once they’d pulled Toombs away from her, he shouted about how they were harboring a fugitive from the law and would pay for interfering with an officer conducting an arrest. Seeing him arrested, on the spot, by two actual police officers had made Jack very glad that nobody could hear her whoop of victory in Elsewhere.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Logan had quietly said from behind another topiary.

Seriously? You’re hiding behind a bush shaped like a camel and calling him stupid?

A military captain, a few years older than and almost as handsome as Ewan, had taken the young waitress in hand, charming away her tears and asking her if she would accompany him to the police station, promising to stay with her and hold her hand the whole time she gave her statement to the authorities. Jack could see the young woman going from thinking that this was one of the worst days of her life to the starry-eyed hope that it might turn into one of the best.

Do the men of this planet just breathe in suave from birth?

Toombs, meanwhile, was staring in outraged confusion at the second Kyra doppelganger, who had just walked up and begun asking Safiyya for directions to the party. This one looked even more like Kyra than the first. Both of Jack’s own lookalikes had arrived with her, one shorter and much curvier than her and the other with long auburn hair braided in an updo that would be impossible to pull off with any wig. Several of Tomlin’s former colleagues had begun murmuring to each other, gesturing to the waitresses and to Toombs as they did.

He just lost all credibility with the military officers who witnessed this, Jack thought with delight as some of them offered to escort the new doppelgangers inside. Everybody at the party is gonna hear just how full of shit his accusations turned out to be. And they’re all gonna see how easy it is for a New Marrakesh woman to meet the descriptions he’s been throwing around…

But, she admitted as she waited for Logan to re-emerge from the courthouse, it wouldn’t be enough. Kyra was right. Their mere presence on Tangiers Prime, if ever proved, would reveal that they had to have traveled on the Scarlet Matador, and that anyone who had given them shelter might know too much about that accident to live.

They still had to leave the planet, and they could only ever possibly return if they broke their trails too thoroughly for any connection between their visits to ever be made.

Thinking about that filled her with strange, hollow pain. This world, she thought, could have become Kyra’s home, maybe even hers too, if only—

Logan and Toombs, fortunately, emerged from the courthouse right as she was in danger of wallowing in the unfairness of it all. Although the two mercs walked side by side, Jack could feel, even across the threshold between worlds, just how angry both of them were with each other.

“…and don’t even get started on me about them bein’ locals,” Toombs was growling as they came into hearing range. “I was goddamn set up and nobody’ll say who by.”

“Nobody knows, damn it,” Logan fumed right back at him. “The women were hired last minute to work for the party, but not by the Meziane family. There’s no record of who contracted them or where the payment came from, but the garden staff was expecting them. Whoever arranged this—”

“He did. He’s here. This proves what I’ve been tellin’ ya.” Toombs scratched at his neck. “Son of a bitch flushed us out—”

“I hate to break it to you, especially now, but you’re wrong,” Logan said, pulling out her comm and cuing something up on it. “I got an alert about this from the Merc Network while I was waiting for you to get processed and released. Hot off the damned presses.”

Jack, who had fallen into step with the mercs as they came in range, didn’t need to look over Toombs’ shoulder to see what he was about to watch. She’d spent most of the morning-day and part of the noon sleeping period building the video file, using extremely powerful, and even more extremely illegal, programs to do it. The programs had just needed some archival footage of Riddick and a few minutes of posing and talking on camera from her and Kyra, and they had assembled everything with such speed and precision that Jack had been left wondering if the people of Helion Prime were right about AIs after all. Even so, it had taken hours to get just right. Toombs’ face, to her delight, became more and more confused, and angry, as he watched.

On the little screen, in long-shot but looking as real as if they were standing in front of the mercs, she and Kyra were dancing, clad in slinky little dresses, on either side of Richard B. Riddick, touching his chest and arms suggestively as he finished a drink and said something that made both of them laugh. They were surrounded by other revelers out on a public street at night, the glittering buildings in the background indicating that the street party was on—

“Shakti Four? What the fuck are they doing on Shakti Four?” Toombs looked as if he was about to break Logan’s comm. She grabbed it back out of his hand before he could.

“It was the spring equinox on Shakti Four two weeks ago,” Logan told him. “Big party. The ship that took off for there was the Barsoom. It boarded and launched while we were fussing over the Scarlet Matador and Bon Temps passengers, and landed there just in time for a hemisphere-wide shindig. I checked the Barsoom’s manifest and there were three last-minute passengers. A man and two women. It’s them. We’ve been chasing wild geese here.”

“Fuck. I hate that guy.” Toombs scratched at his head, making Jack glad that whatever vermin his fingers were chasing down couldn’t jump across the threshold and onto her. “We thought he was distractin’ you from the passengers on the Matador. Then, when they all cleared, we thought maybe it was a diversion to keep me away from the Bon fuckin’ Temps…” His mimicry of Logan’s correct French pronunciation was childishly mocking. “And by the time we were done with that, and thinkin’ maybe we’d missed somethin’ on the Matador ’cause no cameras glitched over by the Pretentious Fuckin’ Good Times… he and his girlies were gone on a whole ’nother ship. Son of a bitch. The big ones are s’posed to be dumb…”

Jack didn’t bother hiding the smug grin that had bloomed over her face. The false trail had worked.

It wasn’t even something she could really take much credit for, aside from a few moments’ research into which ships she and Kyra could have departed on instead of the Matador. Her father had told her about several very dangerous worm programs that still showed up from time to time on the networks… some of which could be tamed and even trained by people with the right codes and sent on new targeted missions. He’d showed her the codes, probably unaware that they would stay in her head forever. Now two of those worms had been liberated from law enforcement containment and, after a little bit of domestication and instruction, one was burrowing its way through the Merc Network, laying bits of false trail and erasing contradictory data as it spread from node to node. In a few weeks, the entire merc network, from one end of the Federacy to the other, would carry her video… and the accuracy of the information about her and Kyra would be massively diminished, too. Another, smaller worm was making minute changes to the Barsoom’s flight manifest records throughout the Federacy.

And, Jack thought ruefully, by doing all that, I’m technically a class-one cyberterrorist now… The felonies kept stacking up somehow.

She’d gone back to the old apartment building to pull those stunts, wanting to make sure that none of it could ever be traced back to the ait Meziane house. That trip could have caused a few problems of its own, but Ewan was the only one who saw her and Kyra sneaking back into the house, and he’d kept his mouth shut even if he hadn’t looked thrilled about it.

“Does that mean we’re leaving?” Logan asked. “Finally?”

“Soon as Pritchard turns back up,” Toombs said. “Son of a bitch still has my Master Key. Where the fuck is he today?”

Logan tapped her comm a few times. “Still somewhere south of here on the coast. The… Shady La— damn it, another brothel. How is he paying for all this shit?”

Jack snickered, remembering the motorcycle pirate that Ewan had given “Pritchard’s” comm to. Apparently, the ride it had gone on was a wild one indeed. I should ask him what that guy’s story is…

“Maybe that big score he insisted was about to come through did, and he just didn’t wanna share it,” Toombs grumbled. “Fucker’ll be back when he finishes blowin’ through his winnin’s. Meantime, you get anywhere with his account?”

“Nope. His password clue was ‘fuck you, Alex.’”

Toombs snorted. “Asshole knows me, I’ll give him that. Lemme try.”

Logan started to hand over her comm again and then stopped, holding it out of Toombs’ reach for a moment. “You break it, and you’re buying me a brand new one with twice the memory.”

“Yeah, yeah… gimme.”

Now Jack did watch over Toombs’ shoulder as he pulled up Pritchard’s Merc Network login. She paid close attention as he entered the other man’s User ID, committing it to memory.

“How many tries do I get?” Toombs asked.

Logan rolled her eyes, you should know this written on her face. “Three. Then the system locks you out for an hour.”

Toombs began to type.

BOOBS

“Oh for God’s sake,” Logan grumbled. “Are you twelve? You know damn well that you have to use capital and lower-case letters, and numbers, and a minimum of eight.”

“Fine,” Toombs snickered, changing his guess.

B1gB00bs

“You’re really not funny,” Logan told him.

Toombs seemed genuinely surprised that his guess hadn’t worked. His next one was obscene enough to make Logan smack the back of his head.

“You’re just wasting guesses here, fergodsake—”

“He’s spent the last how-the-fuck long goin’ from brothel to brothel and you think this password would be out of character?” Toombs asked, smirking as she rolled her eyes. “You don’t even know what he pays those places to let him do. Count yourself lucky.”

“Trust me, anything you find gross, I don’t wanna know about.”

“Annnnd… now I’m locked out. So much for his favorite food groups…”

“Why are you even bothering, anyway? Let’s just get the hell off this rock.”

“He owes me a Master Key.”

“So what?” Logan groused. “You’ve got his Cam-Jam. Call it even.”

“Maybe I will. What’s the word from Her Majesty?”

“Oh. Yeah. ‘You’re fired.’” Logan frowned at him. “That was for both of us, by the way. I’m guilty by goddamn association. Thanks for that, asshole. I had a perfect record ’til you came along.”

“’Til Riddick came along and took a likin’ to the piece of tail you were huntin’, you mean.” Toombs handed her back her comm. “Not a scratch on it, see? Does that mean you don’t have to finish goin’ through the comm records for the morgue staff?”

A chill moved through Jack.

“Yeah, she said she’d have someone else do that,” Logan sighed. “I managed to get your charges reduced to misdemeanor assault. The Meziane family was talking about pressing stalking charges, saying you had intended to assault a visiting relative—way to be subtle, by the way—but I talked them out of it. Plead no contest, pay the damned fine, and we can get off this planet today.”

“Damn right. You wanna come with me to Shakti Four when we do? They’re a civilized world that knows how to serve booze.” Toombs waggled his brows.

“Jesus Christ, you just can’t let go of him, can you? You’re gonna end up like Johns.” Logan shook her head. “Maybe. Gotta check on the status of the Wittier-Collins case back on New Dartmouth, first, make sure the bounty hasn’t been pulled. There’s a bunch of pressure on the government about that case from both sides. Half the planet wants to see her hang and the other half wants her crowned as a rebel princess. Weird damned world.”

“They’re all weird. Whether or not she’s good for the bounty, we catch up to her and we find the big prize. I’m still willin’ to split the take with you…”

Jack turned away from the pair, on a new mission. Slipping back into U1 behind an ornamental screen, she headed for the transit station where she’d rented a locker for a two-month stretch. Once she had liberated the funding cards inside, she went straight to a nearby tech shop, hurriedly purchasing the equipment she needed, and then started back for the Rif. The two mercs would be gone in the next few hours, the next day at most, and she no longer needed to dog their steps. She had something much more urgent to attend to.

As much as she didn’t like going back to the apartment where Kyra had been stabbed—by a merc she now knew was really named Pritchard—it was better to pull some of her more illegal shenanigans there than near or in the ait Meziane house. And anyway, Kyra was using her tablet to plan her next moves. The two of them had agreed, unhappily, that neither one of them should know where the other was going, just in case one of them got caught. Jack spent an hour setting things up on the new tablet, pulling in some of her more illegal resources, before she was ready to get started. Fortunately, the reception for Tomlin’s service colleagues was a lunch-to-dinner affair and she had until full dark to get back to the house without anyone noticing she’d been gone.

The first issue to deal with, she decided, was the morgue staff comm records.

Sometime after the Quintessa Corporation had informed the morgue of their intention to claim the Matador passengers’ bodies, after all, Usadden had called Ewan to warn him. That call linked the Meziane family, even if only tenuously, to the subsequent disappearance of all eighteen of those bodies. It needed to cease to exist.

It took another hour to locate the cache that was being sifted through, which technically belonged to law enforcement but was being handled by Quintessa Corporation staff and their associates. Once she found her way in, she began searching. She had the advantage of knowing what she was looking for, while the staff did not. It still took longer than she liked.

Usadden had been smart; no calls had been made from the morgue to the Meziane household or Ewan’s private comm number. But his private comm showed a call to Ewan’s, approximately an hour after he had finished talking to the Quintessa Corporation on the morgue’s line, that lasted two minutes. Worse, a recording of the call had been downloaded and logged.

She was going to have to fix that.

“Here’s the problem with trying to steal something, or kill somebody, and not have people realize that you were targeting something or someone specific,” Riddick had told her one “night” on the skiff, after Imam had fallen asleep and they could speak freely without incurring the holy man’s censure. The cleric was already trying to limit their conversations; talking shop about felonies would have sent him raging if he’d known. But Jack would have been happy to listen to Riddick talk about anything, and the world of crime was what he knew best. “You do a surgical strike, just taking that one thing, or taking out that one person, and you’ve told everybody way too much about the reason behind it. And how to find you, or your employer.”

“What do you mean?” she’d asked.

“Well… say I was hired to get a new piece of military tech that some developer had at home in his safe. I go in, crack open the safe, steal the tech, and leave… and everybody knows that the tech was the target. They know whoever stole it was hired by someone who wanted to use it, or maybe stop its developer from using it. So there’s a small suspect list, the fences who deal in that kind of tech are put under surveillance, countermeasures go into place to minimize the damage the tech can do… everybody’s anticipating the next steps of someone who’d steal, or use, that tech.”

Jack had nodded. Anything to keep him talking, but it really was fascinating. Riddick was, after all, one of the only people who’d ever defeated one of her father’s security systems, and he’d defeated four of them.

“But what if, instead, I went in like a normal burglar? Emptied out the safe, not just of that piece of tech but all the other documents and valuables inside. Stole the wife’s jewelry. Took the electronics. Made off with some of the smaller artworks. Made it look like my goal was just to grab anything valuable and portable and the tech just happened to get caught up with all that. Now they don’t know what I was really after. Now, as far as they know, I don’t even know what I have. Now they gotta put every fence in town under surveillance. If they want the tech back, they gotta hope that some of the other things I stole start showing up on the black market and can be traced back to one source. The whole way they look for me, and everything I took, changes…”

If she just deleted that one recording, Jack realized, she would draw all the attention to it, to that one call and the people who had made and received it. But if a wider array of materials went missing or got damaged…

Thank you, Riddick, wherever you are. She hoped it was somewhere nice… just not Shakti Four.

Jack checked the log. Eve Logan hadn’t been replaced yet, and she’d only just finished going through the records from the morgue itself. Morgue employees’ private comm calls, however…

…had all been stored in a separate folder. Personal comms required more warrants, many of which were still being signed, filed, and served.

Jack replaced the contents of every single recording within the folder with pure white noise. Then, carefully, she reversed the metadata of Usadden’s call to Ewan, making it look like Ewan had called Usadden. For good measure, she canceled forty of the warrants that were still being processed, including the one for Usadden’s comm, and erased all evidence that they had ever been filed. A quick side-trip using another Ghost Code, into the comms servicer the Meziane family used, and their records also indicated that Ewan had called Usadden that morning instead of the reverse. Much less suspicious.

She listened to a few of the other comm conversations Ewan and Usadden had had in recent weeks, wondering if the Meziane family even knew such things were being kept on file, picking the most innocuous and extemporaneous of them and replacing the comms servicer’s offending audio file with it. If the file got downloaded again and another warrant was served, all anyone would hear was Ewan asking his cousin to settle a debate he and his—literal—wingman had about when and how rigor mortis set in after death. Ewan had apparently won the debate.

Weird thing to be arguing about, she thought. Something to do with a really old vid called Clerks…?

There had been another, actual call from Ewan to Usadden several hours later, which no one from Quintessa or law enforcement had logged or requisitioned. Yet. If they ever did, it would damn the whole family. That one, at least, Jack could erase completely from the system. She spent some extra time making sure that all traces of that call had been eradicated.

By the time she finished, night had settled in. She still needed to hack into Pritchard’s account in the merc network, but that was something she could safely do back in her and Kyra’s room in the ait Meziane house. She wouldn’t be committing any class-one felonies by logging into a dead merc’s account, especially since, she realized, she already knew his password. She wiped her new equipment and reset it to factory specs, hopefully erasing all evidence that it had been used to commit several cybercrimes, and then bundled everything up to take home.

Someone had always escorted her into the ait Meziane house, she realized as she reached the locked gates. Even when Ewan had caught them sneaking back during the noon sleeping hours earlier that day—and he’d never said why he was up at that time—he’d simply opened each of the gates for them and it hadn’t occurred to her that they might have needed keys, even though the courtyard level was under six meters of Elsewhere’s high tide at the time and bypassing them hadn’t been an option. Fortunately, the next tide had yet to arrive. She passed through the gates’ corridor on the Elsewhere side, wondering if she should ask for keys or if that would be a bad idea, given how soon she was going to be leaving.

It had gotten later than she’d realized; the party had already broken up. Takama, Safiyya, Cedric, and Ewan were arguing in the dining room as she entered the courtyard. She slipped back across the threshold into Elsewhere before they could see or hear her, approaching them as a phantom.

“…can’t keep just going off on her own like this,” Safiyya was saying. The presence of General Toal, seated nearby and diplomatically staying out of the fray, explained why she was saying it in English.

“It is what she is accustomed to doing,” Takama said. “That is a habit that we may have trouble breaking.”

Kyra? Listen in with me. You need to hear this. After a second, she could feel her sister paying attention to what she was seeing and hearing.

“But if she is to live with us—”

“Is she?” Cedric asked. “Gavin said she told him she had somewhere she needed to go. What makes you believe either of them plan to stay past Dihya’s recovery? Have you even invited them to yet? Much less heard them say yes?”

“They are children!” Safiyya protested.

“D’you think, after everything they’ve been through and done, that they’re just going to let any of us treat them like children?” Ewan asked. “You know what I was like at that age, and I was still fairly sheltered. They already know how to survive without—”

“Survive? Dihya was stabbed!”

“And Tizzy killed the man who did it,” Cedric observed, putting a gentle hand on his wife’s shoulder.

Jack winced even as Safiyya did.

“My point is,” Ewan continued, “you’re not going to convince them that you’re looking out for them by treating them like kids. Especially since they’re used to us not doing so.”

“Even if that was—”

“Even if that was wrong, yes. I do know that. But if you turn around and start… infantilizing them now—”

Safiyya gasped, staring at her son in offended shock.

“—it might just be the last time we ever see them.” He looked around at his parents and aunt. “I’m serious. For God’s sake, they’re high-powered espers with experience living on the streets and cracking security systems, and the ability to move into a whole other universe at will. You couldn’t keep me out of trouble, and I’m a baseline human and your son. Even if you were their parents and had the authority, how could you possibly think to ground someone who can do all that?”

“You can’t,” Takama agreed. “Not without locking them up in a way that they can’t escape, even with all of those advantages.”

For a moment, as Jack felt her heart plummeting, no one spoke.