Somewhere in San Francisco, California
Kayne was well away from the BO&C offices when she learned about the FBI raid. She was still too close to all the action to feel comfortable laying low in public, and so she had QuIEK arrange for a place to stay. For good measure, she rented numerous places all over the city, booked half a dozen hotel rooms, and bought airline and bus tickets, all using various pseudonyms, some of which had been linked to her already. This was, in itself, one big smoke screen, to keep anyone looking for her bogged down in tracing each and every lead, while she stayed put for the moment.
The place where she was staying, however, was found in a more low key, less traceable way. She had QuIEK scan listings on sites like Craigslist and elsewhere, reaching out on her behalf, usually via text message or email, arranging payments by prepaid credit card numbers, and eventually booking a small, single-room apartment in a seedier part of town. All of this happened behind layers of encryption and anonymity, so no one looking would ever be able to link the activity to her. And the parties she dealt with were unlikely to cooperate with law enforcement. Especially since these were under-the-table transactions.
When she arrived, the place already had occupants, in the form of cockroaches and, gauging by the droppings, a rat or two. Not exactly resort living.
It would do, though. For now. She didn’t plan to stay long. And her M.O. tended to be much fancier, cleaner places, so this was almost like camouflage. It was less likely that anyone would look for her in a place like this.
Still, she’d play this as if someone might come kicking in the door at any time.
Locking the door behind her, she also moved a heavy dresser against it. The room had two windows—one in the living/sleeping space, and one in the very tiny kitchenette, tucked into one corner. Both led to the same brick-lined shaft outside, which rose from the ground to the roofline. The shaft was an odd feature, probably the remnant of some tiny courtyard from when the place was built, and more or less sealed off when it was remodeled some time in the 80s. If she dropped to the ground from her second-floor rental, she’d basically be trapped until she could scale her way out, or she’d have to bust through the window of a ground-floor apartment. Too risky.
But near the kitchen window was a pipe that she thought she could use to reach the roof. And the satellite photos of the building showed that she had a few options for escape from there, including a short leap to the building next door. If she was forced to improvise, she at least had a shot.
Not her finest escape plan, by a vast stretch. But it would have to do for now until she could set up better options.
She was off her game.
Eckhart had put her off her game.
No, that wasn’t fair. The truth was, she’d put herself off her game, because of how things had gone with Eckhart. She’d opened herself up to greater risk, and it had come around to bite her in the butt.
She pulled a chair close to the kitchen window and tethered a laptop to her sat phone, propping the phone on the windowsill. She had picked up the laptop on the fly, ducking into a pawn shop and using her phone to pay for the first working unit she could find. In terms of specifications, it was kind of a dud. It was slow to start up, and sluggish to operate, bogged down as it was with bloatware and porn. But it could tether to the phone, and from there QuIEK could essentially wipe out its hard drive and rewrite its operating system to Kayne’s preferences, essentially offloading processing power to QuIEK, which would then relay everything to the laptop as if it were just a dummy terminal.
The whole setup took around three minutes. And when it was done, QuIEK was already feeding her everything she needed.
She started by catching up on events since she’d left BO&C.
Eckhart had been arrested. That wasn’t surprising, given that he had actually helped her escape from Curie Motors. She looked and saw that he was being charged with aiding and abetting a fugitive. That would be her.
Bertrand had gone with him, though. And a quick snoop into the captured video and audio from the precinct’s interrogation rooms showed that the lawyer was in her element. Kayne felt herself relax a little. She knew how tense it could be, to find yourself in handcuffs and being interrogated. With Bertrand at his side from the start, though, Eckhart had an excellent chance of being absolved.
Especially since the defense seemed to be “blame Alex Kayne.”
“Thanks, guys,” Kayne groused, shaking her head. “Love being the scapegoat.”
That was alright, though, despite being a little annoying. Kayne really was the reason Eckhart was in this mess. And though she didn’t really appreciate the insinuation that she had “coerced” him, what better defense could Bertrand offer, under the circumstances? Kayne was already a fugitive, already wanted for a litany of crimes going right up the scale to treason. A little coercion in the mix didn’t matter much, and it might actually allow Eckhart to go free. Something Kayne really did want.
More to the point, it might justify Kayne’s instinct to flee the BO&C offices, leaving Eckhart behind. It might justify her doubt in the trust that was growing between them.
She had QuIEK set up to flag her as things progressed. She needed to step back and see what could be done to pull together the pieces of this whole thing. She still had a client out there, even if that client had no idea who Kayne was. And she could hardly help Shai Salide or anyone else if she found herself locked in a cell.
It was time to get her head back in the game.
First, she pulled together all the data and files that she and Eckhart had been scanning through at the BO&C offices. She added to this the files she’d lifted from the air-gapped lab at Curie Motors. QuIEK began running interpretive scans, looking for patterns that Kayne might have missed. It would flag and alert her to anything it came across, and she’d apply her good ol’ gray matter to it a little later.
That served to keep the case moving. Now she needed to get her own situation sorted.
She engaged Hyper Paranoia Mode—her funny, not-so-funny term for obsessively plotting and planning as many possible scenarios and routes for escape as she could think of. QuIEK could add potential threats to the list, but even her astonishingly powerful quantum AI software didn’t yet have the capacity to see all angles and consider all contingencies. Neither did she, for that matter. But between the two of them, they could cover most bases, and at least give her an advantage, regardless of the specific scenario.
It took nearly four hours, but in that time she had her plans, routes, and resources in place. And in a way that even she thought was more clever than usual.
Since leaving this roach and rat infested dump wasn’t wise at the moment, Kayne used services like TaskRabbit and several other freelance labor sites and apps to arrange for a few things to be done IRL—in real life. She purchased materials and supplies from numerous retailers in the area, and engaged freelancers to pick up and deliver those things as needed. She rented storage lockers all over the city, using a web of false identities and fake bank accounts, and had the freelancers hide the keys in innocuous locations that she would visit as needed, or when the opportunity arose.
She tipped very well, and five-star ratings abounded. And given that no given freelancer was privy to more than a single aspect of her plans and preparations, there was very little opportunity for one of them to figure things out, or become a liability and talk to the police. If anything, the only real risk was that they might loop back to get a key they’d dropped off, and use it to steal whatever she’d had them stash for her.
Since most of what she had them pick up was mundane—rope, clothing, small tools, etc.—it wasn’t likely any of them would care about taking any of it. And if they did, so be it. She had stashes like this appearing all over the city. Redundancy was fundamental.
Working this way, she eventually had an elaborate network of contingency plans in place. And much of what she set up was a sort of randomized stack of solutions and resources she could put into play as needed, depending on either her current location in the city or her shifting needs.
It was time intensive, and without QuIEK she’d never have been able to do it so quickly, nor could she have kept track of it all. But by the end, she was actually kind of impressed with the result. So much so that she had QuIEK replicate the process and start setting up similar stockpiles and contingency resources in just about every major metropolitan area across the US, and even in some foreign countries. QuIEK could easily multi-task the identities and requests and payments, and track them on Kayne’s behalf. And anywhere she found herself, going forward, QuIEK could guide her to any resources she needed. She wished she’d thought of this years ago.
QuIEK got to work, and within a few hours Kayne would have a vast network of resources just waiting for her.
She felt clever and a little full of herself, which she took as a good sign. It wasn’t every day that a temporary fix became, potentially at least, the best permanent solution. And now, with resources literally mapped out for her if she needed them, she could return her attention to the sort of bleak here and mildly stressful now of this drab, depressing, hopeless little apartment.
Temporary discomfort only, she reminded herself. She’d tough it out in the rat-hole for tonight, but she already had additional safe houses lined up, including a few locations that weren’t technically residences. No reason not to use industrial spaces, from time to time. They could come in very handy.
She would transition away from San Francisco as quickly as she could, over the next few days. She wasn’t sure where she’d go next—she only knew it would be away from here. And that was good—because if she didn’t know where she was going, no one else would be able to guess, either.
She got a ping from her phone and used the laptop to check in on what QuIEK had found.
Agent Symon and Agent Mayher were looking into her appearance at Curie Motors. That was to be expected. Any time there was even the slightest chance that Kayne had finally slipped up, she could count on Eric to pounce. So seeing the two of them investigating at the Curie Motors facility was no real surprise.
What she hadn’t really anticipated was that Symon would book a flight to San Francisco quite so quickly.
Something about his conversation with Stephen Spencer must have set off his Spidey-sense.
She scanned through video and audio surveillance, and QuIEK pieced together angles from several vantage points. Spencers office, itself, had no recording devices active, and since she hadn’t been monitoring live, she couldn’t tap into anyone’s computer or mobile device to hear what was happening.
But there was a camera in the corridor that had a view of Spencer, via a reflection from the glass of an office across from his own. His blinds were open, and though his face was partially obscured, Kayne could see his lips moving.
She called up a few pieces of software she’d procured over the past few years and had QuIEK start scanning and extrapolating from the footage. It only took a moment, and QuIEK began reading Spencer’s lips and translating his words to speech.
Kayne listened to Spencer’s side of the conversation, translated into a lilting sort of AI voice. She couldn’t hear Symon’s side, but she could figure out his questions by context, mostly. It was a one-sided snooping, but she felt she had enough to get the gist, since Spencer was the one providing most of the answers anyway.
For the most part, he confirmed Kayne’s guess, that Bertrand was advising Eckhart to go with coercion as a defense. That made sense.
What didn’t make sense was the timing.
When had Spencer talked with Bertrand?
Kayne flipped back to the footage of Eckhart and Bertrand chatting with local FBI. She compared the timestamps to the chat between Agent Symon and Stephen Spencer. There was a gap—Eckhart and Bertrand had actually wrapped up their conversation before Symon had approached Spencer. But it was a gap of minutes.
She scanned back through security footage, looking at an hour or so of footage prior to Symon entering the security suite at Curie Motors. Spencer had been in his office the entire time, working at a laptop. His features were still obscured in the window’s reflection. But at one point he stood, exited the office, and went for a cup of coffee.
Kayne froze the shot of Spenser, as he left the office.
He was wearing a pair of wireless earbuds.
He was listening to something.
She opened a new window and started picking her way through the Curie Motors network until she finally found the IP address for Spencer’s laptop. He was set up with a roaming IP that would sync his computer with the local network of any business owned by Ross Eckhart. It was a bit like having a cloud-based central storage, with secure access that picked up as he sat in one of several offices worldwide. A virtual presence that allowed him to pick up exactly where he’d left off, as he followed Eckhart from business to business.
Kayne pilfered that virtual space, looking for anything useful. It didn’t take long to find something.
Spencer had several streams of data being recorded to the cloud, from remote locations. One of those was coming from a smartwatch, owned and worn by Adele Bertrand.
Spencer hadn’t had to talk to Bertrand. He’d heard her defense right from her own lips.
What other lines of intel did he have?
QuIEK made short work of finding out, and Kayne looked through the list, leaning back in the rickety kitchen chair.
“Gotcha,” she said, staring at the screen before flicking a roach off of her arm and fighting the urge to squeal and shiver.