Perfect Dark: Second Front Page 5

  “But she’ll be all right?”

  “As I said, yes, she will. If—and I really cannot stress this enough, Jonathan—if she gets the rest she needs. Frankly, I can’t imagine her wanting to be up and about, the state she’s in.”

  Joanna heard Steinberg laugh softly. “Doc, clearly you don’t know her very well.”

  “No, I don’t, but I know our lord and master, and I’m relying upon you to convey to Mr. Carrington that she is to be removed from any active duty for the near future.”

  “How long are we talking about?”

  “If I had it my way? Six weeks. Knowing Carrington, I’ll settle for four.”

  “I’ll let him know.”

  “See that you do. I’ll be back to check on her in the morning.”

  There was a rustle, the sound of the door sliding back, and Joanna knew Cordell had left, and she thought that perhaps Steinberg had, as well. Then the young man moved back into her field of vision, crouching down on his haunches beside the bed. With more difficulty than she thought it would require, Joanna rolled her head to the side to look at him. Steinberg brought his hand up, hesitated, then brushed the hair off her forehead. He frowned.

  It’s really going to be okay, Joanna thought. I’m fine, really. Just a failure, that’s all.

  But, again, the words were too much effort, so she just gave him a smile, the best one she could manage. Even hidden behind the oxygen mask, he seemed to see it, and it made him chuckle softly, made him shake his head with amused resignation.

  “Can you hear me?” he asked her softly.

  With effort, Joanna nodded.

  “You can close your eyes now, Jo,” Steinberg told her. “You’re home. You’re safe. You can close your eyes now.”

  Eyes, Joanna Dark thought, and if she hadn’t been so exhausted, and so hurt, she would have laughed. Not lies. Not flies. Not pies.

  Close your eyes.

  She closed her eyes, and she slept.

  Carrington Institute

  Operations Center

  London, England

  January 18th, 2021

  Even with the anger simmering in his chest, Jonathan Steinberg waited until he was certain—absolutely certain—that Joanna Dark’s eyes were truly closed, that she was finally allowing herself to lower her guard and to rest, before he moved to leave her room. Once her features had relaxed, the gentle rise and fall of her breathing assuring him that she was truly asleep, he rose, fighting his urge to linger.

  That she’d so tenaciously refused to succumb to unconsciousness hadn’t surprised him, even if her unfocused and unwavering stare at nothing during the flight back from London had left him more than a little unnerved. There wasn’t much about Joanna Dark that did surprise him at this point, and it wasn’t because he knew all her secrets or even knew her that well at all, having made her acquaintance less than a year earlier. It was simply the fact that Joanna Dark, in that brief time, had surprised him so frequently and in so many ways that his capacity for it had been exhausted. Perhaps if she suddenly sprung a second head and another three sets of arms, Steinberg could manage it.

  But then again, perhaps not.

  He was a soldier, and he was an experienced one. Before joining Carrington’s crusade against the hypercorpations of the world, dataDyne in particular, Jonathan Steinberg had served the United States, had fought in conflicts in both Africa and Central Asia. He’d been an Army Ranger, had taken fire in Afghanistan, fought house-to-house in Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam. He’d battled with rifle, bayonet, and fist. He knew combat, and he knew killing, and he knew the men and women who did both. He’d seen the good ones and the bad ones, the lucky ones and the fools. He’d seen enough violence to know that the difference between those who were alive at the end and those who weren’t came down, as often as not, to dumb luck as much as skill and experience.

  Joanna Dark was, quite simply, the best killer he had ever seen.

  That she was so good and not yet twenty-one wasn’t something he much cared to think about. That Daniel Carrington was unrelentingly eager in his desire to use her abilities was something he enjoyed contemplating even less.

  How she had become so, he didn’t know. It couldn’t have been easy, and it most certainly hadn’t been pleasant. Carrington maintained that she was a natural, gifted in the art of combat in much the same way that Picasso had been gifted in the art of painting. Maybe he was right, but Steinberg—whose whole career had been shaped by outside training—found himself wondering more often than not how much of Joanna Dark had been nature and how much had been nurture.

  Maybe she could do what she did so well because of her nature. But he knew as a certainty that the only reason her eyes had never closed for more than a blink all the way back to London was nurture. That was training, that was conditioning.

  That was the legacy of Jack Dark.

  Jonathan Steinberg had never met Jack Dark. He never would meet Jack Dark. And as he left Jack Dark’s daughter to finally sleep and rest and begin to recover, Jonathan Steinberg was glad he never would.

  It would save him from having to punch the son of a bitch right in the face.

  Steinberg left Joanna Dark’s rooms in the residence building, turned left down the hall, ignored the elevator, and went straight for the stairs, descending them three at a time. He wasn’t quite running, and he wasn’t quite walking, and he knew he was sincerely and deeply pissed off, but he was having trouble determining exactly whom he was pissed off at. Not Joanna, certainly, and maybe even not Jack Dark—or at least, not more than he normally was. He wasn’t even angry at Leland Shaw’s Hawk, Roarke, who had done everything he could to put Jo down, to literally reduce her to nothing but a stain on the pavement.

  Steinberg didn’t think he’d ever seen a fight like the one between Joanna and Roarke, the two of them trading blows atop the dataDyne Spire in Seattle as lightning lit the sky above them, as citizens oblivious to the truth of their world queued up for a concert below. Joanna, already wounded and off her game, versus Roarke, stimmed to the gills with combat enhancers and leaking data from a neural dump. Roarke fighting to escape and Joanna fighting for time, and it was as brutal a thing as he’d ever witnessed, and it had killed him that witnessing it was all he could do.

  But Joanna had triumphed, the way she seemed to triumph: she had survived, and more, she had won.

  As Steinberg walked out of the building and onto the Institute’s grounds, he allowed himself to admit that he was angry at the Old Man. It wasn’t the assignment, although, once again, Carrington had handed Joanna a job knowing full well that once she took it, she’d see it through to the end, no matter what the cost to herself, and of course Carrington had done so because he had suspected—if not, in some way, already known—that the cost to the agent involved would be damn high.

  No, the thing that was burning Steinberg, that was eating his liver and making him mutter obscenities he’d picked up back during his Army days, was that Carrington had done it and then hadn’t bothered to welcome the girl home. Wounded as she was, beaten as she was, and the Old Man couldn’t be bothered to heft his bulk the two hundred meters or so from his personal quarters to the residence or—God forbid—the vehicle bay, to check on his new favorite agent’s status, to tell her, “Job well done.”

  Steinberg was so consumed with these thoughts that he was halfway toward Carrington’s office before he realized that something was wrong. Or not wrong, perhaps, but off.

  It was well into morning, with the sky still feigning nearer to dawn, gray and heavy. He had been cutting across the lawn, feeling as much as hearing the frost-encrusted grass crunching beneath his boots, and that was the trigger. That sound—it was the only sound he was hearing. While the Institute was never a noisy place, even at the best of times, the silence was so total as to be almost oppressive.

  Steinberg came to a stop, puzzled. After a moment he began to turn in place, a slow three-sixty sweep, taking in the details around him.

  Hi
s first thought—and his anger at Carrington flared the hotter for it—was that the Old Man had ordered an all-stations drill, a full defense deployment, perhaps for training purposes. Along the perimeter wall, Steinberg could see the Institute guards in full turnout gear, apparently armed to the teeth. The ECM “Tangleweb” countermeasures had been broken out as well, the small canisters with their strange radar dishes and odd little launch tubes now positioned on every rooftop he could see. Even the Institute’s air defense systems had been deployed, the Stingray SAM batteries now sitting aboveground, instead of in their holding containers beneath the lawn.

  But it wasn’t a drill. Paranoid though the Old Man could be, he’d never order a full-on drill like this without telling Steinberg—his director of operations—that he was doing so. Not a drill.

  Which meant only one thing, really.

  It meant that the Carrington Institute was expecting an attack from a rival hypercorp.

  Steinberg broke into a run, making for the Operations Center, and becoming more and more alarmed by the thought of what he might find there.

  It wasn’t an ops center any longer; it was a war room.

  For a moment, just standing in the doorway, Steinberg could do nothing but take in the scene. He knew the Ops Center well, had spent more time than he cared to admit within its shielded and countermeasured confines, staring at holographic displays and multidepth plasma screens until tears streamed from his eyes with fatigue. He’d stood beside the Old Man for hours on end, watching as Institute operations and Institute operatives all around the world had undertaken their missions, some with more success than others.

  He’d never seen the room like this, not with every display humming, every terminal manned. Seven separate displays were tracking live video, flicking from one feed to another, images sent from the different Institute campuses around the world, from Moscow to Milan to Chicago to Seattle to Barcelona, on and on, over and over. On at least two other screens, Steinberg could see corporate news feeds, one of them dataDyne’s “premier” subscriber service, the other from Beck-Yama’s mouthpiece. At least a dozen other displays, all of them holographic, ran cascades of code, machine and programming languages that Steinberg could never hope to understand.

  Daniel Carrington stood in the midst of it all, almost dead center in the room, wearing his tweed and leaning heavily on his cane. As Steinberg tried to track everything that was happening in the room around him, the Old Man turned to face him with the ponderous deliberation of a tank acquiring a new target. Past him, Steinberg could see Stanley Grimshaw, the Institute’s computer guru and Carrington’s handpicked combat hacker, working frantically at his multitude of keyboards and monitors.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Carrington demanded.

  “I was with Jo,” Steinberg said, making his way toward Carrington and dodging a technician who was running from one station to another. “What the hell is going on?”

  “You were with Jo.”

  “Yes, I was with Jo, we landed over an hour ago. Cordell says she’s going to be fine, but—”

  “The whole time?” Carrington asked. “You were with her the whole time? In Seattle?”

  “If you mean was I monitoring her the whole time, yes, I was. Was I with her on the Spire, no, obviously not. But you know that, I sent you the preliminary report—”

  Carrington pivoted, used his cane to whack the back of Grimshaw’s seat. “Show it to him, Grim.”

  “Monitor three,” Grimshaw said.

  One of the monitors flickered, the image on it shivering, then redrawing, and Steinberg saw that it was a video capture, some red carpet someplace at night. Lots of young women dressed in Zentek style, heavily made up and projecting attention-grabs from their dataDyne d-PALs or their CMO ring-rings, holographic turnarounds of one of the superstarlet sex bombs that Grimshaw himself seemed to spend so much time online searching for nude photos of. Steinberg couldn’t remember the name, sure it was something stupid, something like Licorice or Bubblegum.

  “This was Seattle, last night, at the Zee Arena,” Grimshaw was saying. “Candee’s last show on the North American tour. This was taken at roughly the same time Lady Dark was supposed to be whacking it out with that Hawk Team mofo atop the Spire.”

  The view on the screen swung around, away from the fans and to the entrance of the arena, catching the sudden burst of flashbulbs as two people emerged, one guiding the other, a man and a woman. Steinberg recognized both instantly.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s impossible.”

  The image froze, and he heard Grimshaw’s fingers dance quickly on his controls, the beep of the computers. The screen redrew, zooming in.

  “Georg Bricker, CEO of Zentek,” Grimshaw said.

  “I know who it is,” Steinberg shot back. “But that’s not her with him.”

  “Sure as hell looks like her, Jonny-boy. Even when we go to the close-up, voila.”

  The image redrew a third time, now focused entirely on the red-headed young woman escorting Bricker from the arena. The woman who looked identical to Joanna Dark, or at least, identical to Joanna Dark when she hadn’t been alternately shot at, stabbed, beaten, and blown up.

  “Even got the tat right, perfect dimensions, right down to the micron,” Grimshaw was saying. “And believe me, I checked.”

  “You’ve never been that close to Jo’s tattoo,” Steinberg muttered, moving closer for a better look.

  “And you have?” Grimshaw shot back.

  “That’s not her,” Steinberg told Carrington. “It’s just not, Daniel. It’s a physical impossibility for Jo to be in two places at once. If you want proof, just go to her room and look at her. This fake here doesn’t have a scratch on her.”

  “Georg Bricker was found dead in the woods outside of Olympia roughly three hours after this footage was taken.” Carrington turned his head slowly, showing Steinberg his profile. “CMO completed their hostile takeover of Zentek as of seventy-three minutes ago.”

  “So this fake, she’s CMO. They’re the ones who kick ass in body modification and cosmetics.”

  “It’s possible, certainly. That’s not our problem at the moment.”

  As if taking Carrington’s words as a cue, alarms started shrieking all around the room, every monitor simultaneously flashing the words “intrusion attempt” in pulsing red letters. Steinberg nearly jumped, but Carrington didn’t move a muscle except to deepen his frown. To his right, Steinberg heard Grimshaw swearing, then begin shouting out commands to the technicians throughout the room.

  “Dammit, they’re trying again!” Grimshaw said. “Brody, monitor the firewall, c’mon, quick quick quick!”

  “They’re through the first gate!” someone shouted.

  “Second gate!”

  “C’mon, c’mon!” Grimshaw urged. “Come and get me, you low-baud bastards. Come and get me.”

  Carrington leaned forward, whispering into Steinberg’s ear, just loud enough to be heard over the din of the still-screaming alarms.

  “This will be attempt number seventy-six to breach our network.”

  Just as quickly as it had begun, the alarms, the flashing, all of it ceased, and Steinberg watched as Carrington pulled back, straightening up. He flashed a small, hard smile, utterly devoid of amusement.

  “And stay out!” Grimshaw said, and he sounded out of breath, and more than a little punch-drunk. “Okay, everyone, reset infrastructure. Let’s see if we can chase it back this time. Move move move!”

  Carrington put his free hand on Steinberg’s arm, turning him away from the monitors, from the image of the Joanna doppelganger, guiding him toward the back of the room, out of Grimshaw’s earshot. He was walking slowly, and the frown was still in place, and Steinberg wondered if Joanna wasn’t the only one who’d been going without sleep.

  “Someone has poked the bear, Jon,” Carrington said to him, softly. “Someone has poked the bear, and made it look like we were the ones doing the poking. And now they’re poking bac
k, and it will get a lot worse before it gets better.”

  “Which bear?” Steinberg asked.

  Carrington waved back to the various monitors without bothering to even look their way. “Take your choice. CMO. Beck-Yama. DataDyne. One of them—if not all of them—thinks we took Bricker out.”

  “Jo’s a new operative, she’s not that well known—”

  “She’s known enough, Jon. Certainly she’s known to Anita Velez, and we have every reason to believe she’s known to Core-Mantis, as well.”

  “Another reason to think it was Core-Mantis who did this.”

  “They’re certainly the ones making the obvious profit from it,” Carrington agreed.

  “You think dataDyne’s going to hit us? You think Velez, DeVries, they’re viewing this as your opening salvo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The words came out with unexpected difficulty, filled with obvious distaste and ringing with frustration. Steinberg wondered how many times in his life Daniel Carrington had been forced to utter them before. He didn’t imagine they’d been said easily, or often, if ever.

  “It’s a dataDyne strategy to attack the opposition’s information networks before launching a conventional assault,” Carrington said, after another moment’s thought. “It’s their playbook, but it could be misdirection. After all, if we know it’s a dataDyne tactic, it’s reasonable to believe that both Beck-Yama and CMO know it, as well.”

  The thought of dataDyne dropships coming over the wall, of Shock Troopers falling from the sky like raindrops, made Steinberg wince. “You really think we’re about to be hit?”

  “I don’t know,” Carrington said for a second time. “But I’d rather we be ready in case we are, wouldn’t you?”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “Prepare to repel boarders.”

  Steinberg nodded, began heading for the door.

  “Jon?” Carrington called out, his tone softening. “How’s Joanna?”