chapter
FORTY-EIGHT

I poured myself a whiskey and sat down. I needed to get out of here fast with the fridges, but it was no good just wandering the streets. The obvious place to take them was the drongle warehouse, just as Gabe had planned, but it wouldn’t be dark for hours.

What the hell had Nena done? Had she killed that cop? Was that why she didn’t want to be head hacked? And what of the test tubes? Had she stolen them? Or bought them in some black-market deal?

“Don’t look in the fridge,” she had said.

Perhaps Gabe had been right all along.

Perhaps she was just a criminal who had been playing on my weakness. After all, that was all she ever claimed, but I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted to believe that she was the one who knew how to fix my life.

I had more whiskey.

There had been stories of people trying to control the population with fear strategies before.

There had been a clumsy attempt while I had been a cop by a marketing consultancy firm working for police finance. As a marketing strategy, they thought up a criminal gang called Warriors from Nowhere You Would Actually Know. Their whole plan was to secretly create an atmosphere of fear in the city. That way, they argued, the people would be happy to see more money poured into the police budget to combat the threat. And the more money the police had, the more they could enhance their image through marketing without having to spend it all on actually fighting crime, because there was no crime. The plan was that simple.

So they had set out to spook the city by giving the impression that this gang—Warriors from Nowhere You Would Actually Know—was rife, even though it didn’t exist.

But it all went spectacularly wrong.

The name of the gang was an error, for one thing. One of the marketing people came up with the idea of calling them “Warriors” and put in brackets, “from nowhere you would actually know,” meaning that at another time they would think up some make-believe place.

But some marketing graduate with a degree in graffiti husbandry at Tampa Bay University had taken that to be the actual name. And before the error could be rectified, a graffiti spray team from New York had been flown in. They hit the city wearing a flurry of baseball caps and, with a dash of exuberant lettering, the name was out.

It wouldn’t have mattered, but something else happened after that. Something way more sinister.

Kids on the street, seeing the graffiti, became intrigued and agitated, and they wanted to join the gang. And in the months that followed, amid the rumors, whisperings, and posturing, Warriors from Nowhere You Would Actually Know somehow slipped into existence.

And then it grew.

For a little while, Warriors from Nowhere You Would Actually Know became a powerful underworld player on the Western Seaboard. And initially, the New Seattle Police didn’t have the resources to keep tabs on them.

They fired the marketing company, and I remembered how the new one was always scathing about what the old marketing company had done. They spent a lot of time going around and saying, “Who did your marketing for you last time? Cowboys they were.”

So maybe it was police marketing. Maybe they had created a whole new generation of fear strategies.

Marketing companies wielded a lot of power.

Even the army had image consultants assigned to each unit who went into battle. They had major input in what the best way of attacking an enemy should be, so they put across the most aggressive image.

I had to get the fridges out of here, and I realized I was trying to form a plan.

And I’d deliberately not made any plans in years.