DeathWeb (Fox Meridian Book 3) (37 page)

Blown up to cover the whole house, the image was far easier to follow and Fox followed it down a corridor behind the entrance lobby. The wall there was smooth, perfectly even, and undecorated aside from a coat of paint. Hiding something there was unlikely.

‘You onto something?’ Cant appeared beside her as she headed along the corridor to what they were assuming was the master bedroom.

‘He’s got a heavy, metal shield structure under the concrete. Might be just a central structural support, but it seems like a huge waste of space if it is.’

‘Let’s hope he doesn’t waste space.’

‘Amen.’ Fox walked into the bedroom, turned an immediate left, and saw the oversized mirror in an elaborate frame set against the wall. To her, it looked rather too tightly fixed to the wall. ‘Mirror. You take the far side. Look for a release catch.’

Cant found it. There was a click and the mirror peeled away from the wall on the left side enough to allow it to be hinged aside. Behind it was a very serious-looking vault door with a keypad mounted over a wheel. Trying the wheel shifted it about a quarter of an inch.

‘That’s going to need cutting gear,’ Cant growled.

‘Unless we’re lucky,’ Fox said, pulling her pistol and popping the magazine. ‘I suggest standing well back and covering your ears.’ She slapped another magazine in as she backed across the room as far as it would allow and Cant moved off into a corner. Lifting her weapon, she fired. The bullet punched into the key panel, ripping through it before exploding. The shockwave reverberated through the room and tossed fragments of electronics out onto the plush, red carpet. Fox rushed forward and tried the wheel. It shifted more, but it was stiff. ‘Could use a lever,’ she said as she continued trying to force it.

‘You want me to–’

‘Military-grade muscles, Cant. I may look less bulky than you, but I can lift you off the ground without breaking a sweat. There should be a crowbar in the vertol.’

He was back in a little over a minute, by which time Fox had ground the wheel through a quarter turn. ‘That AI of yours is very helpful,’ he said as he slotted the bar into the wheel.

‘Pythia’s a gem all right.’

With the bar in place, they could both lean on it and the wheel gave with a scream of protest. The door levered back into the recess on hinges that could have held up a bank vault door, and the scream of metal was replaced by another kind of screaming. Fox and Cant glanced at each other, and then he signalled that she should lead. She pulled her pistol and started down steep, bare concrete steps. There was light below, starkly white. Fox reached the bottom and swept the room quickly as she stepped to the right. Cant came down on her heels, his own pistol rising to scan, and then he stopped.

‘Oh… fuck,’ the inspector said, his tone oddly flat.

Fox lowered her pistol and took in what she had walked into, and realised that what she had walked into was Hell. There were metal benches, padded benches, various devices out of a BDSM dungeon, and one or two things that belonged in something out of a medieval torture chamber, most of which Fox considered herself fortunate she could not name. At the back, standing under a pair of bright spotlights as though it was the feature in a fashion show, was a large, black, metal disc with a red, padded X shape mounted on it. The limbs of the X could, it seemed, be widened or narrowed on grooves cut into the metal, and Chantal was mounted on it, her legs spread as far as the device would allow. Her skin looked pale in the harsh light, except where marks from a cane or a whip marred it, and she was screaming in what looked a lot like agony. Needles had been driven through her nipples and labia, into her thighs, and wires led from the needles to a large box set beside the wheel. Lights flashed, apparently at random, on the box, and Fox had a fair idea what it was doing. She rushed forward, yanking the box’s plug from the wall. The screaming continued for a few seconds and then Chantal’s head lolled forward on her neck and the screams were replaced by sobs.

‘Get the medics down here,’ Fox said. Cant seemed all too happy to run back the way he had come and be out of the room under Grant’s house. Fox stepped closer to Chantal. ‘Chantal? Can you hear me? You’re safe now. We’ll have you down in a minute.’

All she got in response was more sobbing.

~~~

Dillan stood at the bottom of the steps and looked around the room, her face pale. Inside the room, Pythia’s forensic swarms were busy going over every square inch of the place and that was a very good excuse not to venture further, but Dillan had no desire to do so anyway.

‘You didn’t get to see the girl fixed up there like some sort of expressionist living art exhibit,’ Fox commented from behind her.

‘I think I can live with that,’ Dillan replied, turning around. ‘What do you need from me?’

‘I’ve started Pythia on the room. She’s been going an hour or so, but it’ll take longer. I want every bit of forensic evidence we can get. You need to supervise. Pythia’s an excellent technician, but she’ll be the first to tell you that she has no real imagination. She learns, but she doesn’t create. You watch what she’s getting and you direct her if you think something needs more attention.’

‘Okay, I can do that.’

‘Right. When you’re finished down here… I doubt the rest of the house has anything, but you could run the bedroom. Check for prints on the mirror frame. I’m guessing you’ll find two sets, plus mine and Cant’s, and that’ll help nail Grant down.’

‘Two sets?’

‘Grant and his gynoid. I’m betting he gets her to clean up the mess once he’s done.’

‘No sign of either of them?’

‘No, they’re in the wind. I’m going back to the tower to see if we can come up with a way of finding him. I’ll take the Q-bug, and Pythia can fly you back when you’re done.’

Kit appeared behind Fox, concern on her face. ‘Fox, there is something else.’

Fox looked around at her assistant. ‘What?’

‘I have been trying to contact Mister Dandridge to tell him that his daughter has been located, as you requested. I have been diverted to messaging every time. His implant appears to be offline.’

‘Contact Corrine and have her wake him up.’

‘I did. She informs me that he is not at home or anywhere in the LifeWeb building. He left no indication of where he was going.’

Fox closed her eyes. ‘Shit. So that’s where Grant is.’ Opening her eyes again, she started up the stairs, avoiding Kit even though she was just an image. ‘Contact Jackson, tell him the situation. Give him an ETA and tell him he’s got that long to come up with ideas. Grant seems to be good at avoiding cameras, but maybe we can find him if we track Dandridge.’

‘On it,’ Kit replied, vanishing again.

‘Good luck,’ Dillan called after Fox.

‘Thanks,’ Fox replied, ‘I think we may need it.’

~~~

‘Security cameras at the LifeWeb Tower show him leaving the building,’ Jackson said. ‘Miss Hoffman, Dandridge’s assistant, was quite keen to help in any way she could. Unfortunately, while we know he left at three thirteen, we don’t know where he went. He did not use the maglev and Inspector Cant ran the autocabs servicing that area and none picked up Leonard Dandridge.’

‘He can’t have walked…’ Fox began and trailed off. ‘Grant hacked his implant, changed the ID.’

‘That was my assumption. The inspector has granted us access to public camera feeds. The best, only, idea I can come up with is to scan them for Grant and Dandridge, but it could take
days
to work through all the recorded footage for, say, an hour after he left the building. He could have gone anywhere in the city.’

‘Well, we have to start–’

Kit appeared, her eyes wide, excited. ‘What about the Cube?’

Jackson peered at her. ‘Please explain, Kit.’

‘We wouldn’t need anything complex. A whole bunch of class 2 AIs. We run hundreds, thousands of them doing exactly one thing: watching video for the two men. If we instruct them to be a little generous with the parameters and send possible matches to me, that should filter it enough for me to locate the definite matches.’

Jackson blinked. ‘My dear girl, you’re a genius. Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘I’m betting you would have if you’d got eight hours straight instead of five,’ Fox replied. ‘How long to set it up?’

‘Half an hour,’ Terri said. ‘I’ve been wanting to put an AI on that box since he built it. This isn’t quite what I had in mind, but it’s a start. By the time we can feed the vids into storage, I can have the AIs online.’

‘It was a good idea?’ Kit asked.

‘It’s a bloody good idea,’ Terri replied, grinning. ‘We’ll have to think of a reward of some kind. Difficult for an AI, but we’ll think of something.’

‘Already thought of something,’ Fox replied, ‘but it’s going to have to wait until Grant’s in a cage. So that’s an incentive to find him fast, right, Kit?’

‘He is,’ Kit replied, ‘already found. Metaphorically speaking, of course.’

~~~

Fox stood at the observation window of the room Chantal Dandridge had been taken to. The girl, a pretty blonde, looked better sleeping than she had sobbing on the wheel, but occasionally her face would twist as some image worked through her nightmares. There would be nightmares. Fox knew all too well that there would be nightmares.

‘How is she?’ Fox asked.

Corrine, standing beside her, answered in a flat voice. ‘Sedated. The wounds were not extensive. Mostly. She’ll never… have children. The doctors were a little worried about infection. Her anal canal and bowels were damaged. They think they have that under control.’

‘She’ll need help, counselling.’

‘It’s being arranged. I’m handling Mister Dandridge’s affairs while he’s… he’s missing. You think Mister Grant did this? That he took Mister Dandridge?’

‘I
know
he did this. I’m pretty sure he killed Penny Dandridge and twelve other people. We know he created a backdoor command system in the LifeWeb core software. He would hack into it and control LifeFit, replaying an old run from the user’s stored ones and tracking them on the route they were taking.’

‘This will destroy the company. It’ll destroy Leonard. He thought of R. A. as a friend. I never quite understood why. The man was… cold. He looked at me as though I was an object.’ Corrine shuddered at the memory. ‘I caught him looking at me once, at a staff party. He looked at me as though he wanted to peel me.’

‘No one said anything? I can’t believe you were the only one.’

‘No one said anything. He
was
LifeWeb. It took years to get the staff together to take over from him. But I think the way he treated his own staff was one of the reasons Leonard finally agreed to move him out.’

‘You stopped calling him Mister Dandridge.’

Corrine frowned. ‘Formality seems rather pointless. Leonard and I have been friends for years. Not… close. He loved Penny.’

‘He… both of them are going to need a friend over the next few months.’

‘I’ll be there, doing what I can.’

‘Good. I’ll try to get Leonard back so he can have a friend.’

~~~

‘He’s where?!’

‘At sea,’ Jackson said.

Fox looked at Kit. ‘You found him, I take it.’

‘My colleagues and I,’ Kit replied, nodding. ‘We tracked him to a marina south of the LifeWeb Tower in the area known as Freeport. There are a number of marinas in that area. Mister Dandridge has a hydrofoil yacht moored at one of them. Marina records confirm that it is no longer moored there.’

‘Can we track it?’

‘All attempts to contact the vessel have failed. Its automated transponder has apparently been disabled.’

‘But I had an idea,’ Jackson said. ‘Apparently my brain’s woken up. We’ve got a number of satellites in orbit.’

‘Yeah, I did the induction course.’

‘Then you may recall we have a number of high-resolution mapping systems. They’re part of the monitoring project for arid regions, primarily, though they also provide dynamic updates of our navigation maps. We have a contract with the governments of a number of countries for that. There are six of them in polar orbit, and one will be over the northern Atlantic region for fifteen minutes in thirty minutes.’

Fox nodded. ‘I’m going to get Pythia airborne. You relay the position when you get it.’

‘Fox, there’s a tropical storm sweeping in from the south.
He’ll
be lucky if he gets through it.’

‘If he’s heading for Europe, he can keep out of its way. I need to get after him, Jackson. He’s got an eight-hour head start already. Maybe more.’

Jackson sighed. ‘Sometimes you are far too much like my daughter. You’ll need some way of getting aboard the ship, potentially in heavy seas, and a survival suit. You can wait a few minutes while I arrange that.’

‘Yeah, I can wait for that. I’m crazy, not stupid.’

Airborne over the North Atlantic.

‘I have them on radar,’ Pythia announced. ‘Thirty kilometres ahead of us and following the expected course.’

‘Heading for Bermuda,’ Fox said. ‘Bloody idiot.’

‘What does that make us?’ Kit asked.

‘Idiots determined to see justice. Or something. Okay… Pythia, take over. Take us in as low as you can. The sea
is
too high to drop onto the deck, so it’s Jackson’s toy. We’ll need to be low.’

‘I’ll get you as low as I can, Fox,’ Pythia replied. ‘I have control.’

Fox pushed her seat back and got to her feet. The suit Jackson had provided felt a little odd, skintight and slick to the touch, but it was guaranteed to keep her warm and came with a helmet which could provide a couple of hours of air. Supposedly it could handle light weapons fire too, but she preferred the idea of not testing that.

In the rear of the vertol, she pulled on a light, streamlined, hardshell rucksack made of similar material containing her pistol, spare magazines, and restraints. Then she put on her helmet, making sure it was sealed around her neck.

‘Pythia, once I’ve dropped, you head back. This weather’s going to get worse.’

‘I could loiter for a few minutes, Fox.’

‘Just go. There’s nothing much you can do if I run into problems anyway.’