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  “So if you see these people, you automatically hate them?” Rachel asked. “Smell their fear and that gives you carte blanche to just kill them, because they don’t matter?”

  “Something like that,” Laux nodded. “I’d have your Forensics folks pop the case open if they haven’t already and see if there are two, unrelated chips going on in there. The magic might be in the bridging software, rather than the Synth Chip itself.”

  He fell silent again. Thinking. Eyes flickering back and forth without focusing on anything in the room.

  Finally, he returned to the present tense.

  “In fact, I think I know how you might do it,” he said. “At least knowing that it was done somehow. Wouldn’t have thought of it on my own. Like you, I always thought that sort of thing was impossible.”

  Greyson reached into his pants pocket and pulled a stack of bills he kept there for those times when using a traceable credit system made contacts nervous.

  He peeled a castor, a one hundred tooney note named for Castor the Beaver on the front, and set it on the desk, along with one of his business cards.

  “I’d like to request that you maybe send me some of your thoughts, once you refine them, Laux,” Greyson said. “And try not to flood the underground market with those chips, after you design them. At least not until you’re sure they won’t be turned to evil.”

  The man studied the bill, the card, and Greyson’s face in equal amounts without speaking for a long moment.

  “Information wants to be free, Leigh,” he said simply. “Technology flows like water.”

  “Understood,” Greyson agreed. “But I suspect that a new way of doing chips like that is a significant revolution. The next cyberpunk wave, if you will. You’re likely to get rich on it, at least for a while. I’m hoping you can at least keep things on a more friendly keel, if only for a while.”

  “This is all just theoretical,” Laux replied. “I’d have to actually study that chip to be sure. Any chance?”

  “Not at the moment.” Greyson decided to play the man honest. He’d done them good, just with the bits he’d been able to guess at.

  Melanie had always maintained that a good code writer made so many personal decisions in the process that it was almost like leaving fingerprints behind. She’d frequently settled for second best or worse in code. What she called “script kiddie crap” because while she could write better stuff herself, it could subsequently be traced back to her, instead of some punk in Rome or Mexico City.

  “Are you that good?” Greyson asked anyway.

  He knew the answer he’d get, regardless of the actual truth. They all tended to be full of themselves.

  “Maybe,” Laux said, surprising Greyson. “But as you said, this might be a whole new way to handle architecture that nobody has ever thought of. A year from now some Vietnamese megafab will be churning them out for one of the big companies in entertainment by the pallet load, so I’ve probably got a month to solve the design and build it. Another month to write some scenarios, unless I hire some folks. Then the rest of that year to make some cash legitimately, before I have to go back to the underground kinks that you can’t buy at the grocery store.”

  “Lemme talk to some people,” Greyson offered, unsure who might be able to clear a career criminal to visit a police computer lab without being stripped naked first and sheep-dipped.

  Good hackers never went into legitimate business for that long. The rules and dipshits they had to deal with weren’t worth it. They could generally make much more money for way less hassle.

  “Anything you can get me would shave days off the design,” Laux said helpfully.

  A hand dipped out of sight and came back with his business card.

  Just the letter L and an email address that was entirely a random hash of numbers and letters, using the University of Prague’s .edu ending.

  Greyson didn’t ask, just smiled and pocketed it as he rose.

  “I’ll send a ping to that address just so I don’t have to type it more than once,” Greyson acknowledged. “Then I’ll ask. Anything you want to send to help me understand that design when I do have the schematics in front of me will help me convince them.”

  Laux rose and shook hands with both of them.

  Greyson saw himself out, a silent Rachel in his shadowy wake. She waited until they were out in the parking garage to speak.

  “People really live like that?” she asked in a voice filled with wonder and a little resentment.

  “I doubt it,” Greyson replied.

  “How so, then?”

  “The rest of that hallway goes somewhere,” he pointed out. “Might emerge in some other residential tower where our friend lives. Or has an above-ground office. Pretty sure most of that was for show. Criminals like to look fancy and exotic, when most of them live in slums one step ahead of the men and women with badges. Computer crime is even harder, since everything you do has to pass through someone else’s system, where it leaves traces and can be back-tracked.”

  “How do you know so much about white collar crime?” Rachel asked.

  “Remind me to tell you about Melanie sometime,” he grinned down at her. “Before Emmy. Like Laux, probably.”

  “He didn’t impress me that much,” she offered offhand.

  “Then you weren’t paying attention,” Greyson said. “The ones that are that casual about it are usually the ones at the top of the game. Not the punks. He’s probably already designing something in his head and will have a prototype ready by tomorrow, if I know the type.”

  “Then what?” Rachel asked.

  “Not my problem, Rachel,” he said. “Still chasing the asshole who gave our perp the chip, the gun, and my picture.”

  9

  Hunter

  Greyson and Rachel had returned to the office after that. Hunters kept even weirder hours than police detectives, because frequently they were after people and creatures that only came out at night.

  Occasionally, Greyson hoped for a case where the suspect got up a little after dawn and had a good breakfast in a nice restaurant, just so they could both get to bed at a reasonable hour.

  This wasn’t going to be that case, either.

  He left Rachel upstairs filling out paperwork and doing her homework while he headed out the ground floor entrance on foot. Boston had enough of a decent public transit network that you could get anywhere with a little work. Or find a taxi reasonably cheap. Universal Basic Income kept people from starving, but they still needed something to do, so a lot of them took up driving strangers or doing hobbies that might make them some cash on the side.

  Whatever floats your boat. It got him a few miles up the road, away from the office.

  He needed time to process. Up until a few hours ago, he’d been filled with that silent fear that he’d have to risk going off-planet to find answers, even though he didn’t know of any enemies outside humanity.

  At least none willing to admit it.

  Lots of humans who hated his guts. No shortage there.

  Greyson circled back in his mind as he made his way on foot now, south and west for no better reason than he needed to move his legs and the weather was holding okay this afternoon. Gray and overcast, but not too windy. Not too cold.

  Might even turn into a nice spring day when nobody was looking, although he wasn’t holding his breath on that one. It was Boston, after all.

  He checked his comm when his stomach rumbled. Early dinner worked, since he’d had a late breakfast and no lunch.

  If a human chiptech like Laux really could make that chip, that eliminated a whole layer of misdirection from the case. Greyson wondered if whoever it was had built that logic into their plan, originally hoping that the shooter would have gotten lucky and killed Greyson, and that whatever detectives ended up investigating would fall for the obvious leads and head off-planet.

  He smiled as his feet took him towards a little mom-and-pop joint specializing in Ghanaian food. He didn’t come in here mu
ch because usually Rachel wanted Irish or Indian food when he asked.

  But he was alone right now, and could do whatever he wanted.

  It wasn’t real Ghanaian food like you got in the old country. Nothing ever survived contact with American culture, even in this day and age. Folks came over for whatever reasons and wanted comfort food to keep them company. Eventually someone opened a restaurant, but had to buy things from American suppliers. Then locals discovered the joint, regardless of their own original ethnicity.

  The American melting pot was the one everyone ate from.

  But it was pretty good food and would hit the spot in his day.

  The woman bustled out to his booth with a menu just as his comm beeped with a message.

  Where are you? - Denise

  Lovely. Greyson wondered if the Metropolitan had come up from DC this afternoon and been looking for him at the Bureau office. Denise Upkins tended to do things her way. That frequently involved sudden movements like that, just to keep people on their toes.

  He thought about it and shrugged.

  Just sat down for food.

  He sent along the address, wondering if she’d demand he return to the office, or show up here. And if she’d have Edgar Redhawk, her personal assistant/political assassin, in tow. Probably drag Rachel along if she did.

  ETA 5.

  He nodded to himself, wondering what he’d done, or someone else, to light a fire under her ass.

  Order me the Jollof rice with lamb.

  Greyson chuckled. He’d wondered if she remembered this place, and a dinner date they’d had in the semi-mythical past.

  Apparently so.

  The waitress returned and Greyson explained that he had someone coming along in five to ten minutes. He ordered a sweet coffee for himself and dinner for the two of them.

  Rachel or Edgar could sit at a different table and order their own damned food, but Greyson got the impression that they’d be outside in a stretch limo if they came at all, idling at the curb with those political plates that meant you couldn’t issue them a parking ticket.

  He passed the time by making a mental list of everyone who hated him enough to hire assassins. That was a long list, upon reflection, even eliminating dead people.

  It was a much shorter list when he cross-indexed in all the names that could lay hands on his most recent ID photo from the Bureau files.

  Dominguez was dead, killed originally by Ethen, even though Zaborra Strani, Ethen’s bully of a partner, had gotten the official credit.

  Now-former Boston Police Commissioner Buford Owens had managed to retire onto his pensions without prosecution, probably after doing a deal with Upkins to keep his mouth shut and maybe hand over whatever blackmail files he had accumulated.

  Now-former Eastern North American Head Police Commissioner Yulia Kwan was another head that had rolled last fall when Denise had started paying attention to all those little, niggling rumors of corruption in the department. Kwan had been demoted and eventually took a transfer back to Vladivostok to live closer to her extended family. At least that was the public story. She also happened to be half a planet away if someone wanted to interview her about subordinates taking money under the table and maybe kicking things back to her along the way.

  Greyson didn’t think Kwan was as corrupt as Owens had been, but she didn’t have white hands. None of them did.

  Owens had just been promoted according to the Peter Principle, reaching his level of incompetence when he should have stayed a Police Commander. Still a political job, but a civil service one, where the union would hold its nose and protect you from hungry sharks like Metropolitan Denise Upkins on a bad day.

  The only other name that stood out was the one he’d been circling for several days like bait hanging seductively off a hook.

  Detective/Captain Olek Jan Zielinski, retired. Greyson’s boss in the old days. A nasty little weasel of a man.

  Zielinski was the kind of cop that forty-odd years later still referred to a President of the United States of America as “that nigger.”

  The man hated everyone that didn’t look like him. Didn’t talk like him. If you weren’t Polack-American from Chicago, you were trash. Adding a bunch of alien species to the mix sixteen years ago had just meant that Zielinski had that many more kinds of people to insult and abuse. Colors and shapes beyond all the humans the man could oppress.

  Zielinski hated them all. Still did, as far as Greyson knew.

  It had probably been Zielinski’s calling in life to join and help shape the Hunter Bureau when it got started. Greyson assumed that even a force with a reputation as bad as CPD had been happy to get rid of the man and all the problems an attitude like that probably brought to the concept of community policing. He was a rusty iron hammer when most of the time you needed a velvet glove.

  The basic purpose of the Hunter Bureau was to make great hammers for any number of problems.

  Greyson still liked to think of himself as a shiv. That was the army leftovers in his head. They’d trained him to handle those jobs because they could always call in airstrikes.

  Sometimes politics necessitated that you use the edge of a razor, rather than the facing front of a claymore mine to solve your problems.

  Zielinski might be worth solving with a claymore one of these days. Or a big sword.

  Denise walked in before Greyson got too wound up on that thread of logic.

  At fifty-four, she was still gorgeous. Tall black woman who dyed the grays away. Originally from Maryland. Widowed thirteen years ago. Two grown children and grandkids now.

  She’d been a power figure in Boston and Northeast politics when he first encountered her as part of a case. Their political tumbles had turned into romantic ones a time or two and he still had good memories of the woman.

  He wasn’t sure it would have worked out, but things had been precluded before they got too engaged.

  Greyson rose from his booth and went to kiss her on the cheek, but she turned into him as he did and it landed on her lips instead. And didn’t settle for just being a peck.

  In public, even.

  Shit, what’d I do now?

  But she was smiling. That evil grin that said she was up to no good and nobody was going to be able to stop her. Hopefully, she hadn’t just given him the literal kiss of death.

  This was Boston. Folks around here understood that concept.

  Probably just as well he’d had to step out of her life seven years ago. She’d been poised to run for Metropolitan, the mayor/governor of the Eastern Metroplex of North America. Went on to win it and been reelected.

  Greyson had too many secrets from his time in the Army to survive any sort of inquiries into his sordid past. Assassins didn’t turn into public boyfriends of powerful politicians.

  So they’d had a long, heartfelt conversation one night, over a bottle of good wine. Gone at it like bunnies until dawn. Then he’d walked away, turning into just another anonymous Hunter again as she got herself elected and occasionally dated actors and retired athletes. Famous people, like her.

  But she was sitting across from him now in that same Ghanaian restaurant that had been one of their first dates. It was late afternoon and she was dressed like a lawyer, which she was.

  Nothing about the woman right now suggested that she was the most powerful politician on this side of the Mississippi River or Atlantic Ocean.

  Just a woman meeting her beau for an early dinner.

  Anybody want to buy a bridge, while we’re at it?

  Greyson smiled neutrally as she ordered sweet tea and hit him in the face with the full force of her beauty and charisma.

  Gods, this woman was amazing.

  He made a note to never let her and Emmy meet, unsure how they’d kill him, just that he’d never survive both of them in the same room.

  “Still keeping your usual schedule, I see,” she offered as the waitress walked away to get drinks and probably deliver food.

  “Until you can convince the
bad guys to keep banker’s hours, I’m kinda stuck with it,” Greyson replied, unable to stop grinning at her.

  “I talked to Rachel Asher briefly,” Denise said in that off-hand manner that suggested it might have involved Chinese water torture or maybe a rack. “She mentioned that you had a few leads you were pursuing…?”

  “Was just making a list of everyone who hated me enough to send an assassin in public,” he replied with a little more lightness in his voice than the situation probably deserved.

  “I could get you a copy of the phone book with a few pages torn out,” she chuckled.

  He shrugged. Not an entirely wrong assessment.

  But most of those names just hated men and women with badges. Someone had given the perp his picture.

  “So what brings you up, Denise?” he asked, as the waitress brought out two plates for them and then retreated.

  “You had a conversation with Parsons that suggested that maybe you weren’t the only target here,” Denise said.

  He hadn’t spelled it out like that when talking to the Captain, but Metropolitan Upkins was a sharp woman. So was Rutherford Parsons. Both had to be in order to read the tidal currents after long enough in the trenches.

  “Lot of change in the Bureau recently,” Greyson said ambiguously as he started into his dinner, watching her do the same. “Plus, the perp had a picture in his pocket that nobody should have been able to get hold of. Someone’s sending me a message, Denise, but I’m looking for all the misdirection they’ve added to the sauce.”

  “Like maybe they resent me promoting Rutherford Parsons?” she asked. “You didn’t want the job. Actively threatened me with retirement if I offered it to you again, as I recall.”

  “Still don’t want it,” he reiterated. “Considered asking London if they have any openings when Rachel goes, just so she can be my boss for a while.”

  “Anything to get away from me?” she teased, but there was an edge under it that Greyson could hear.

  He and Emmy didn’t really have a thing. She had her life making money and changing the future. He was a Hunter who dealt with aliens doing bad things on Earth. They intersected frequently enough, for dinner, dates, or just wild sex, but that was an adult thing.