The client was a billion-dollar beauty, her face a poet's nightmare of subtle splines and eyes a shade of green calibrated to the nanometer. I bet to myself her pheromone adjustments alone had cost more than what I make in a year. It wasn't a bet I expected to settle — she had too much money and brains to come to my office, and online smell and carbon capture would always be ten years in the future — but even a washed out analyst cosplaying as a one-man PrivIntel company can dream.
"Will you do it?" There was training and tech in that voice but it'd have been a voice to die or kill for even without any of that. I was glad my cheap setup was dropping a lot of the harmonics. It wouldn't have been the first time the right tone of voice made me do something stupid.
We both knew I was going to say "yes." If she was half as smart as she was trying to pretend she wasn't, she already knew she was offering the kind of money I wouldn't refuse. Not at least for the sort of grey hat job she was asking me to do.
"I'd like to clarify expectations first," I said. "Are you sure there is no way to reconstruct your birth DNA from any cell in your body?"
She didn't sound dismissive but I could tell she wanted to. Hiring me was deep down the list of things she had tried. "Doctors told me it can't be done. The retroviral modifications were too thorough and early."
Thorough and early. That was one way to put it. Some tediously creepy rich guy had paid or pressured her or her family — I hadn't asked and she hadn't offered; she would have to, aftera — to put her through a hell of a complete retroviral glow up the moment she had hit puberty, followed by a long list of modifications, soft bioengineering, and training.
Part of me thought it had been worth every dollar. It wasn't a part of me I liked very much.
"Alright. There are things I can try. You are paying me partly for knowing them and partly so you don't have to. But I want to be clear there's no guarantee. I will do my best, and there's the bonus in my fee structure to convince you of that, but I can't promise I will find it."
"Your best is all I ask for," she said, and closed the call.
I instantly felt 10 years older and 20 IQ points smarter. But I wasn't any less in debt, not yet at least. The client had sent the background information right away, and after an hour looking through it I grabbed my hat and went out to take the subway downtown for a previous engagement.
I let stations pass by while thinking about the problem of finding my client's original body. Subways are good for thinking if you don't mind the cameras. Sometimes I mind them very much but I was going for coffee with a friend, all above board and loggable.
I changed my plans when I saw a geological formation of a goon not making even a token attempt to blend into a medium-density subway crowd that, unlike him, wasn't wearing a designer bulletproof sweater. It wasn't my first time with a tail and I could think of two or three interested parties from previous cases. But there's a combination of bulk, money, and faux-sophisticated brutal assholery very specific to ex-military guys working for the rich and creepy.
So the client's guy (owner? lover? employer? all and none?) had been monitoring her close enough to know she would hire me and had sent someone my way.
There are two reasons to put a tail on a person. One is to know what they are doing. The other is to convince them to stop doing it. For the first one you want people who look like everybody else. For the second one you use people like this goon. I knew how that flow chart went: Be ominous, then threatening, and if that doesn't break their resolve, break other things in a more kinetic way.
The guy looked like someone who didn't like lingering in the early steps. With some luck I could take care of him, I thought, but nobody's lucky long-term and the client's guy had plenty of money and goons to keep making his point.
I cursed semi-audibly. My tail would take it as a sign that I was beginning to reevaluate my enthusiasm for the case. He wouldn't be wrong. I had planned to approach this as a slow and methodical information research job. I didn't like the other kind of job and the tools it called for. I disliked it enough to have left my previous employer under a cloud of strong words and military-grade NDAs.
I cursed again.
If I had to do it I had best do it right away. I left the subway carriage very carefully; slow enough to make sure the goon could follow, not so slow he would figure out I was roping him in. Stringing along someone this way is much harder than following someone or losing a trail. Not just because you have to get the speed right. If the other person is looking forward to roughing you up you also need to avoid places where he might try before you're ready.
Just try doing that working without backup while keeping an eye in case the guy you're stringing along calls for some and making sure you pass in front of the right cameras in the right places. It was tricky business, but doable with some skill and experience.
An hour and a half later the goon cornered me near the badly lit back entrance of a small dirty office building. He put on some "tactical" knuckles without saying anything; I guessed he hadn't enjoyed the city tour.
"Come on, Bob," I said. "You know you want to see me suffer."
The goon sneered. Never makes anybody look smarter. "That's not my name," he said and then he convulsed and dropped.
The woman who had crept behind him pointed a second taser at me. "You lost your nicknaming privileges when you quit." Roberta smiled. I had seen sweeter smiles. "Quite right about the appeal of seeing you suffer. I don't have a lot of time but I have this" - she nodded to the taser. "What about you?"
"I have a new closet door for double-double-u," I said.
Roberta didn't lower the taser. She just stopped looking like using it was an imminent action rather than a deeply held desire. We had some history of the mixed kind. Her professional animus against double-double-u, her White Whale — our nickname for my client's kleptocratic trash of a guy — was purer and more dangerous than if it had been personal.
"That gets you time. What's the part where you suffer?"
"I need to ask you a favor." I didn't have to fake how little I looked forward to it.
Her smile wasn't fake either. She called in somebody to pick up the goon to be sent to an abstract somewhere — one of the reasons I had quit the job; I put a pin on that for later — and she waved me inside the field office. Not all the way in but it was the first floor and not the basement. I took that as a good sign for my chances of leaving the building alive.
Roberta sat on one side of an anonymous shareable desks, asked for a cup of coffee for herself without offering me anything, and ordered me to sit.
"Talk."
I did. I didn't know a lot they didn't, and I'd be hard-pressed to ever know something they couldn't know, but there's a difference between being able to find something out and being aware of it. So I told her some things, offered others, and asked for a couple.
She drummed her fingers on the table for about fifteen seconds. She was a quick thinker — by the tenth second I began to get worried — but then she stopped and nodded.
"Deal."
Half an hour and some heavily supervised database research later I was escorted out of the building. I wanted to get the first part of the plan done as soon as possible but I would need a shower and a change of clothes to project the right impression. It was almost dawn and public transit was as sluggish as I felt. Against preference and habit I took a car to my apartment.
A shower and a cup of coffee pulled their reliable trick. I hesitated for a minute on which clothes to use. Ended up choosing my old black work suit as I had feared I would have to. A gun as well — never used but could be necessary for the part — but no eyeware.
I took a look at the mirror. I never do that unless it's for work. Did I look like somebody who would destroy somebody's life just because it was on the day's to-do list?
In my qualified professional opinion, I did.
I left without my hat. The person I was going to visit lived far from me and I didn't want to make me too easy to backtrack if he tried. I took a bus halfway and then rented a car. You can't use a ride or just walk to somebody's door when you're going to blackmail them.
It was a nice door in a nice neighborhood. Not White Whale-nice. That sort of guy lives in compounds, buys entire buildings, and has to choose in which of their islands they want to spend the weekend. The guy whose door camera I was monologuing to was a second-line manager in a company that had once done the real work for something the White Whale had wanted done. That made him someone I could approach. His online habits made him someone I could use.
I had been good at that sort of thing and still was.
The guy opened the door himself. Bald, stooped, sweating even in the cold air coming out of the door. He had run to open it.
"Who are you? Why are you saying that? You can't say that in front of a camera!"
I smiled my old-job smile. "Camera is in amnesiac mode, Doctor." Easy to trigger if you know how. "You on the other hand have to pay attention and remember. Are you paying attention?"
He had frozen. I began to repeat what I had said to the camera. He stopped me right away. "I am! I am."
I told him what I wanted him to do and how much time he had to do it. I didn't have to threaten him. He didn't protest. I told him to repeat to me what I had told him to do, and when he did I left. That part had taken much less than ten minutes. Half an hour if you included the time I had spent using my old job's databases to find a horrible person in the right place and force him to do something not to punish him but to help my own goals. The bus home took longer than that.
The next few days I worked hard to be boring. The client's guy couldn't be sure of what had happened to his goon or even if I had had anything to do with it. I spent the time doing legwork in very public places on long-term cases that had nothing to do with him. Anybody watching me would assume I had been scared off the case and lose interest in me. Or assume I had been scared off the case and tie up a loose end.
After the end of the week I had given the doctor I put on again my black suit and took a different combination of public transport and car to his place. He wasn't the type that might try to kill me and I had done my best to make him feel he didn't have to kill himself. It was still a small relief when he opened the door, gave me what he had stolen for me, and then closed the door on my face without saying a word. I saluted the door camera to indicate my amiable intent to never meet again and then drove the car half-way to my office and took a bus the rest of the way.
The client was waiting outside my office door. I hadn't told her to come and she obviously hadn't been waiting for long. I opened the door and invited her in without making any comment on that. As she entered I told myself I had won my bet on her pheromone enhancements.
Once inside my office she didn't sit. She turned around to me and said "Do you have it?" She almost made it sound like a question.
"Sure," I said, and gave her the small cryogenic pack the doctor had given me. The greed in her eyes as she took the unmodified cloned embryonic cells stolen from the clinic's archives was the first ugly thing I had seen on her.
"What do you want it for?"
"None of your business. I'll transfer the rest of your fee."
I nodded and waited. In my line of work you get a feeling for when somebody wants to say something even if they don't have to.
"I can't have children," she said matter-of-fact without looking at me. I wasn't surprised. I had taken a quick look at the files on her procedures. "I've arranged a surrogate. A small place, quiet." Like the city her parents were from, I knew. "I have a good life planned for her."
"Isn't that a form of engineering?" I've never known how to stop myself from asking questions like that.
She looked at me like I didn't and couldn't possibly understand. She was probably right. Then my former client left the office in silence, leaving behind a memory of unnatural beauty, a healthier balance in my bank account, and somewhere in the world a rich guy without a conscience but maybe a grudge if he remembered I existed and figured out what I had done. And if cared at all. Who knew which one of his crimes he had thought I was looking into.
An incoming message went past my phone's filters with a loud ping. I opened it and saw a middle finger emoji. It looked cheerful. Meant Roberta's people had picked up the package I had left in the bus back to my apartment, with the full files of what the White Whale had done to my former client and biological material to prove it. It wouldn't bring him down, but used at the right time and place it could do some damage. I reckoned that might keep me from her taser the next time I saw her.
I hoped I would never have to. I had gone through a lot to stop being that man. It was late and I was tired, so I closed the office and took the bus home. I was still wearing my black suit.
(Originally posted on my blog.)
