To see is human, to prehend divine
EP sat back down in her chair and took a long deep breath with her eyes closed before sing the ss again. It felt like the first time she had been out of her chair in days, but it had really only been about an hour. She cracked open an import Monster and watched the cops try and salvage some scrap of peace from the wreckage of the fight.
A sed police helicopter was in the air, their infrared and standard cameras now supplementing her feed. She was careful not to let her drones fly into frame. After she had pyed target practice with the remaining gunman for a few minutes, swooping down with expendable micro drones, fshing their high powered lights, and then going into avoidance maneuvers, SWAT had moved in. When one of her droagged the BearCat armored vehicle rolling toward the bridge, she dismissed her fleet, leaving only a few sor drones parked on rooftops for surveilnce, while the rest flew off toward one of her recharge points or wiped into the river.
The gunman opened fire on the BearCat, but quickly realized it ointless and scattered in opposite dires. One grabbed a dirt bike off the street while the other two got into cars left idling by fleeing civilians. Within five seds, one of the cars was crushed half into scrap, and the other was riddled with so much 5.56 that it looked like it had been hiding sparklers us paint. Motorbike guy was tracked by one of the choppers and zipped down the rht into a police roadblock. He skidded to a stop, raised a pistol, and colpsed in a rain of bullets.
Now she watched the ove in to secure the area while ambunces waited fshing on the side lines. Her adrenaline was fading, and she felt like sleeping for a long time, Monster be damned.
She had sent out phishis disguised as w enfort and media agencies promising cash rewards for footage of the shootouts, and her worms were already w their way through hundreds of phones aing aly captured pictures or videos from the se. All the security cameras had been wiped, and she was monit the social media feeds for anything that might have slipped through. Hopefully, it was a needless precaution. Soon Michael would know where the was and it would be just a matter of getting one of her drones out to get it.
The cops had been all over Cooper’s POE and apartment the instant the warrants had gohrough. She wondered where he could have put it, but didn’t have the energy to give it much thought. Best leave that to Michael. As the ambuarted streaming in across the bridges and cops shut off the traffi the Bazaar, just under five minutes behind the team’s departure, an arm chime sounded in her ears. One of her sing programs had picked up something in the buzz.
It hone call, pced from ihe police line, located via an ultrasonie emitted by one of her nded drones. She pulled up the call and muted everything else.
“Fug amateurs. While we sit with our thumbs up our ass.”
“Shut the fuck up about it. you get out?”
“Nah, they got it all blocked off. It’ll be a while. What’s ?”
“Not a damn thing over the phone. Just keep a. They’re making moves.”
“So where am I going?”
“They’ll find you.” The caller clicked off the line.
“What the fuck—” and the call ended. EP she phone numbers a programs to pile the usual data into new files. A sed ter she was watg the caller ihe police line from a camera dro the back of the admin building. He got out of a dark sedan parked i and waved to a cruiser driving down the back road. Buzz cut, Carhart jacket, bck boot stamping out a cigarette.
The Lise pte number got sent along with the other data, and sure enough the files firmed he was one of the cops from the strip mall shootout, now on admin leave. Standard procedure as he had fired his on. It didn’t take any software to know the other caller robably the other cop who had fired a gun and lived to tell about it. She tagged them as Hardworlders in their files and tried to see if she could get eyes oher one.
She gnced over at the micro drone feed watg the shootout se from across the river. Red and blue lights poured across the bridge now that SWAT had it secured, reminding her of the cops rushing down to their doom minutes earlier.
The memory flicked a switch, of other vehicles rushing over the bridge minutes before. The way the gunmen had rushed in at the end. Desperate. Unprepared. Like they had been ordered. The way the entire shootout had felt like twenty crash dummies uhree officers. The PKM, right where it o be.
It all felt like expendables deployed by higher forces. It felt like pawn sacrifice.
Something told her this job wasn’t as tied up as she had hoped.
The all seeing, break into anything in a heartbeat hacker is mostly a fairy tale, but when you bend your own past ay itself to suit your needs, fairy tales e true. ime, star-crossed lovers, magic s, and a man who shouldn't be judged by his cover. episode, Golden Hour.