Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) (24 page)

‘Not sure,’ Fox replied. ‘Someone’s screwed with the surveillance cameras… Look, you take over the forensics sweep. Just the body and the blood on the wall here by the door. The room’s going to be a bomb site as far as trace evidence is concerned and we’d be talking to half the city if we ran it.’

‘Okay. What are you going to be doing?’

‘Finding out where the security system is controlled from.’

~~~

Everything in the tower funnelled, eventually, into a core control and data suite at the bottom of the building. There were a number of potential access points to the fibres along the route to the control rooms, but most of those were designed to be accessed by small, arachnoform maintenance robots like a more specialised, smaller version of Fox’s house robot. The junction boxes were human-accessible, but Fox could check those visually as she worked down and there were no signs of tampering.

Security was handled by a single man and a collection of class 2 AIs. The latter did the majority of the work, watching for potential problems and then contacting the human operator when something caught their attention. The man on duty tonight was looking nervous, distinctly nervous. His skin was pasty and there was sweat on his brow. He looked young, genuinely young rather than the result of cosmetic alteration, so the nervousness was likely down to the probability that he would be blamed for the current situation and fired.

‘The building schematics suggest that all the fibres from the security network feed to a primary junction under this room,’ Fox said as the young man sweated in front of her.

‘Uh, yeah. There’s a branch in there which feeds all the data to a hard storage bank and the main computer. The main computer feed is scanned by the AIs and they pass anything suspicious to me for verification. They’ve given me nothing all night.’

‘All night?’

‘Nothing since… ten-sixteen, uh, twenty-two-sixteen.’

‘Uh-huh. It’s Friday night in a leisure complex with drink and sex, and nothing odd’s happened since quarter past ten?’ She quietly put a request through her VA to have the building’s security AIs checked for viruses. ‘The data gets fed into a hardwired storage unit?’ She could see his cheeks colouring as he realised his mistake.

‘Yeah.’ Standing, he walked over to what looked like a standard bank of computing equipment across the room and tapped at a keyboard. A screen lit up and he began to type. ‘It’s isolated. Data can only be accessed through this console. The feeds from the cameras are one-way. No one can get in and delete the data without the operator–’ He came to a grinding halt, staring at the display. ‘Th-there’s nothing here after about ten-thirty. That’s not possible. You can’t delete it from outside. You can’t–’

‘No need if it was never recorded. Can we access the hub?’

He pointed at the floor where the outline of a hatch was visible. ‘I need to unlock it from the console.’

Fox slipped her pistol from behind her back. ‘You do that, and then I want you to stay out of the way, preferably out of sight.’

Looking at her as though she had just grown horns, he moved back to his console and tapped a sequence into a keyboard. There was a solid clunk from below as the locks on the hatch disengaged and then a section of the floor was levering up. Lights flickered on in the space below and Fox could see a short ladder leading down. There was maybe a metre and a half of headroom down there. Leaning down, she poked her pistol into the hole and scanned the sights around, watching in-vision as it showed her bundles of cable and huge junction boxes. No sign of anything alive, even on infrared. She dropped down into the hole.

The space was bigger than she had expected: to the right it narrowed a little but extended out to run under the main operational control suite five metres away across a corridor. Neither eyes nor gun sight indicated the presence of anyone else down there, but she kept her pistol pointed down the tunnel as she scanned around the cabling beneath the security room. It took her only a few seconds to locate the patches which had been looped into the video feeds. The designers had made it fairly simple: by the time the camera feeds reached this level, all the signals were multiplexed into only five cables going on to the two destinations. Still, it looked to Fox as though someone had built specific hacking tools to do the patching in each case.

Frowning, she put a request through her VA for a forensics tech to be dispatched to go over the room and then slipped down the narrow conduit to the other end where the room opened out again. The cabling here carried control data rather than camera feeds and security data, but it looked more or less the same. Except that there was a hole in one wall which had once been covered by a grill. The grill was on the floor and the crawlspace beyond was just about large enough for a human to get through if they were small. The building schematic indicated that the conduit led to a machinery room twenty metres away where the municipal power and data cables entered the building. Like many slightly older blocks, Clayton Tower had solar cells on the roof, but supplemented that with external power, and there was a need for a fairly thick pipe to the district’s data network because of the businesses on the upper floors.

‘And someone managed to get into the building through the access tunnels,’ Fox mused aloud. ‘They built gadgets specifically to block off the camera feeds and make sure we would get nothing from those, and they slipped in here to plant them…’ She peered at the conduit opening in the wall of the chamber. ‘And I’ll be damned if
I
could get my shoulders through there. No way is someone with artificial limbs doing it.’

Turning, she started back for the security room with a frown on her face. There were a number of ways the killer could have pulled this off, but the simplest was that he had an accomplice.

31
^st
January.

‘You think this is some sort of conspiracy?’ Canard said. He was actually on the other side of his desk, peering across at Fox and Sandoval suspiciously. ‘You’re serious about this?’

‘Occam’s razor, Captain,’ Fox replied. ‘This guy is a genius hacker with special ops training, cybernetic limbs, and the ability to manipulate remote robotic drones while infiltrating a building intent on murder, or he’s a rogue AI with a military cyberframe body no one has noticed, or he’s got one or more accomplices.’

Canard grunted. ‘Sandoval?’

Fox kept the scowl off her face and turned to look at her partner. Yeah, let’s ask the new hire from private security about this, because he’s
bound
to have a more reasonable outlook. Or… Oh yes, he has contacts in Wayden Executive Services…

‘I have to agree with Inspector Meridian,’ Sandoval said, surprising both Fox and Canard. She hid it better.

‘Explain,’ Canard grumbled.

‘It’s just too much for one person. It’s not just that they infiltrated the building once, but they had to have done it at least twice to find out, before last night, what kind of cabling the tower’s security system had. Schematics are one thing, but there’s no indication of the kinds of connectors used in the wiring anywhere. And the uniforms went through everyone in that building and couldn’t tag our man. He got in
and out
without being seen by security cameras from the lobby in. They had that place locked down within minutes of the gunshot. He didn’t have time to get out, but somehow he got out.’

‘Because he went through the machine room and down into the municipal utility tunnels,’ Fox supplied. ‘He knows the city like the back of his hand, or has access to exceptionally good navigation software. Frankly, whoever is doing this has near-military levels of software and training. The Army would have a unit doing an op like this, not a single person.’

‘You’re suggesting this is some form of terrorist operation?’ Canard asked.

‘Sounds like it to me,’ Sandoval replied. ‘Maybe one of the Islamic militant groups. You’ve got women in high-profile or, some would say, questionable jobs. The deaths are violent and extreme, blowing their brains out, wiping them from existence. It spreads terror.’

‘That it does,’ Canard agreed. ‘Have either of you seen the news channels this morning?’

‘Kit gave me a summary before I came in,’ Fox said, her tone sour. ‘Someone leaked the circumstances of Avery’s death and suggested that this was the latest in a line of similar homicides.’

‘And I have a number of advocates dropping me a lot of messages requesting a rapid clean-up.’

Fox sighed. ‘I shouldn’t worry about that too much.’ Canard’s glare was fiery, but Fox was expecting it. ‘This’ll be resolved one way or another soon.’

‘And what evidence do you have for that assertion?’

‘This last death, it was sloppy. They’ve never let us find evidence of how they masked the killer’s entry and exit before. They
wanted
us to figure out there’s more than one person involved. There’s only one reason to start showing off your hand like this, and that’s because you’re about to go all in. Whatever this bunch are up to, they’re in their end game.’

~~~

‘Fox?’ Kit waited for Fox to walk back into the apartment before speaking to her. The AI had been largely silent for most of the morning, saying only that she was continuing to analyse the crime scene data.

‘Kit,’ Fox responded. The kitsune’s virtual image was showing signs of disquiet, maybe even alarm: she was even shuffling her feet. ‘Got something for me?’

‘I have… I don’t have facts, exactly, Fox. I have a number of disturbing coincidences that lead me to inferences which I find–’

‘Maybe you should just tell me what you found and see what I make of it all,’ Fox suggested, pouring coffee for herself.

‘That sounds like a most logical way to proceed. I received your comments on the meeting with Captain Canard and Detective Sandoval. I do not believe that these crimes follow the pattern of any known Islamic terrorist groups.’

‘Okay. Reasons?’

Kit watched as Fox walked around the sofa and sat down, her eyes on the window, which Kit had darkened and was presumably about to use as a display. ‘You do not consider the theory valid either,’ the AI asserted.

‘I am asking for
your
reasoning.’

‘My reasoning is the coincidental alignment of skill sets,’ Kit replied, her brow knitting. ‘The organisation of this recent homicide and what it suggests regarding the previous ones, the creation of devices to bypass cameras and their application, and the logistical requirements, these are all skills which Daniel Caravel and his associates possess.’

‘But they’re part of the Hunt investigation, Kit.’

‘I know.’ The AI’s tone was plaintive. ‘I see a pattern in the data I am processing. I have attempted to discover a flaw in that pattern, but the only flaw I
can
find is that it connects two streams of data which have no reason to be connected. These people, who have come to my attention via an unconnected matter, are capable of all of the tasks required to commit the homicides, aside from the actual executions. No known member of the group has cybernetic limbs.’

‘It’s better than my “it doesn’t feel like religious terrorists” feeling, and you’re forgetting that we already had a connection between the two cases via Bucksbridge.’

‘I had not forgotten about Mister Bucksbridge. His involvement
does
add an extra level of credence to my theory, but I actually believe
that
connection
is
coincidence.’

Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘His message to Miss Adamshi occurred some time ago and was, I believe, an entirely genuine assertion of his political views. Mister Bucksbridge sent a message to a musician he was a fan of. Perhaps, when the group was looking for a victim, he made the suggestion of Miss Adamshi to get revenge for her “traitorous behaviour” when she took up her contract with ATW, but I believe the message was sent long before any consideration of her murder.’

‘Oh… Oh yes.’ Fox’s eyes widened. ‘I think you’re right. In fact, I’m betting the cell didn’t know about it. Killian was the only other native New Yorker in that group, right? He was the connection to Bucksbridge.’

‘That is correct. Mister Killian has not been sighted in this metro for over two years, however.’

‘So they needed someone local to handle logistics and Killian knew Bucksbridge. Not an ideal choice. Buckyball was small-time. The meme had him fairly firmly, but he was nothing much in UA. Not even that big on the ideology or someone would’ve locked him up by now. I’m betting he never did much more than sending nasty mail to people he considered sell-outs.’

‘His NAPA profile suggests that that is the case.’

‘So he screws up. He sees his chance to make a bit more of a mark and suggests Adamshi as a victim. She’s a good target from his viewpoint. She sold out to ATW. She ignored his mail. He’s not bright enough to think we’d track his message down and then him. He doesn’t tell the others. Caravel would certainly have selected a different target.’ Fox looked up from her musing. ‘You didn’t connect Killian to Bucksbridge until Killian’s name came up.’

‘Mister Bucksbridge’s profile does not contain a list of known associates. Mister Killian’s does.’

‘Yeah… That’s what I expected. When you uncovered Bucksbridge’s mail, the cell had to cut him off, sacrificed him, but they also had to tidy up and make sure he couldn’t be connected to any of them. Get into NAPA records and sanitise his records… Not easy unless… Yeah… This is starting to come together. Not that I’m liking the way they’re converging.’

‘There is another coincidence I found which I do not like.’

‘Oh?’ Turning, Kit looked up at the screen and a list of the murder victims appeared there, one above the other, surnames first. ‘Oh,’ Fox said flatly, ‘when you look at it like that…’

~~~

‘I’ve put a couple of feelers out,’ Sandoval said as he watched Fox in the kitchen area of her apartment. ‘I have a few contacts back at Wayden who watch the terrorist groups. They may know if a cell has been setting up in this area.’

Fox flashed him a smile and went back to following the instructions a cooking program was displaying for her. ‘Wayden are moving into the metros big time at the moment, right?’