Lock In (Lock In, #1)(70)

“What the hell happened?” I asked, looking at the monitor.

Vann looked over, cradling a cup of coffee. “You’re up.”

I gestured at the monitor. “Maybe I should have stayed asleep.”

“Then when you woke up it would have been worse,” she said.

“Someone firebombed a tour group of Hadens,” Tayla said.

“Seriously,” I said.

Tayla nodded. “The Hadens were grouped up, ready to go to the Lincoln Memorial, and then some *s drove by and chucked a Molotov cocktail at them.”

“Which is less effective on threeps than on human bodies,” I said.

“The *s found that out when the threeps took off after them.” Vann pointed at the monitor. “Look, they’re showing the video again.”

The video was from the point of view of a tourist phone. In the foreground a little kid was whining to her parents about something. In the background, a car swerved toward a group of tightly packed Hadens. A young dude popped up out of a sunroof, lit a Molotov, and flung it at the Hadens.

The tourist now turned his full attention to the flames. Several Hadens were on fire, flapping and rolling to put themselves out. The rest of the Hadens starting running toward the car. Whoever was driving—it was obviously on manual control—panicked, took off with his friend still half out of the sun roof, and rear-ended the car in front of him. The Hadens reached the car, pulled the young man out of the sunroof, and yanked the driver out of the car.

Then the beatdown truly began. By this time one of the threeps hit by the cocktail had made it over to the car. It began kicking the bomb thrower, legs still aflame.

“It would be funny if the entire Mall and Capitol Hill area weren’t now on lockdown,” Vann said.

“You can’t say the dudes didn’t deserve it,” I said.

“No, they deserved it, all right,” Vann said. “It’s still a pain in the ass for everybody else.”

“Do we need to go in?”

“No,” Vann said. “In fact I just got a phone call telling me that you and I are on medical leave until Monday. We’re supposed to let Jenkins and Zee follow up on all our stuff.”

“Who are Jenkins and Zee?” I asked.

“You haven’t met them yet,” Vann said. “They’re goddamned idiots.” She pointed to the screen. “The good news is they’ll handle this and all the other penny-ante crap we had to deal with this week so we can focus on the important stuff.”

“So we’re not doing medical leave after all,” I said.

“You can,” Vann said. “Personally, I’m kind of pissed off about being shot. I want to take the people who made it happen and screw them right into the wall. And while you were sleeping, Shane, the other shoe dropped.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Vann turned to Tayla and the twins. “May I?” she asked, and reached up to signal the monitor to switch stories. She flipped through several until she pulled one up, full screen. The image with the story was of the Accelerant logo.

“It’s that * Hubbard,” she said. “He’s buying the Agora from the government. The servers, the building, and everything else. He’s taking Haden space private.”

I was about to respond when a call window opened up in my field of view. It was Tony.

I connected. “Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m at the FBI building,” Tony said. “Where are you?”

“I’m at home,” I said. “Medical leave.”

“Fine,” Tony said. “I’m coming to you, then.”

“What’s up?”

“I’d actually prefer to speak to you about it someplace private,” Tony said.

“How private?”

“However private we can make it.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“You were right,” Tony said. “About me being wrong. But it’s a lot worse than that. A lot worse.”

* * *

“Glasses on,” I told Vann.

She put on her monitor glasses. “Hit me,” she said.

I pinged her and let her into my liminal space. Then I entered it myself.

There was a threep standing on my platform. It was Vann.

She held out her hands, looking at her representation. “So this is what that’s like,” she said. Then she looked over to me. “And that’s what you look like.”

“Surprised?” I asked.

“I hadn’t actually thought of you having a face before, so, no, not exactly,” she said.

I smiled at this, and realized that it was the first time that Vann had ever seen me smile.

She looked around. “It’s the goddamned Batcave,” she said.

I laughed.

“What?” she said.

“You reminded me of someone just there,” I said. “Hold on, I need to bring Tony in.” I pinged Tony a door.

He stepped through and looked around. “Spacious,” he said, finally.

“Thank you.”

“Kind of looks like the Bat—”

“Tell us the bad news,” I prompted.

“Right.” A neural network popped up above us. “This is Brenda Rees’s neural network,” he said. “It’s a Lucturn model, the Ovid 6.4 specifically. It was a fairly common model from eight years ago, and it’s running—well, was running—the most up-to-date software for its model. I’ve done patches for this network a few times, so I’m pretty familiar with its design and capabilities.”