Drop Zone Read online

  “Is it a diner like this?” Mina said, tearing off a piece of her scone. It crumbled with the right consistency. She popped it in her mouth.

  Yum.

  “Nope. It’s Italian. They specialize in that specific trace,” Norm said. “But just like any printed restaurant, they can do you a solid and make just about anything.”

  “You’re right. This is good,” Lee said, scooping up his second bite of eggs. “Best I’ve had in a while.”

  “I bet your new meal printer can create some great food.” The food was better than decent. Mina enjoyed the flavor. Some printed recipes mimicked the way food used to taste much better than others. It was usually because they’d been around so long and had taken time to perfect it. This was definitely one of those places. Mina would have to keep it in mind.

  “I hope so. It’s not a Magnito, like yours,” Lee said. “It’s an Al Dente, but it’s the current model. I had it print me a quick bowl of cereal this morning. It was great.” Lee beamed.

  Mina was extremely happy for her talented partner, who’d earned his new residence and a decent meal printer because of quick thinking and a big brain. “Let’s finish this up and get back to the story.” She checked her cuff. No message from Vince. “Then I’m reporting to McAllister. Once he gets a copy, things can move forward.”

  Once Norm was finished with his story, she hoped like crazy they’d have something solid to go on.

  * * *

  “Wait a second,” Mina said. “I want you to clarify. You were friendly with Waterbury on and off for four or five years before you figured out the animal-mutilation piece?”

  Norm had already covered his torture, in detail.

  It’d been hard to listen to, but necessary. Before that, he’d quickly recounted his years-long efforts to get Waterbury in a box, starting with when his niece had contacted him for help, through having Waterbury picked up for cashing in his dead mother’s security borrows.

  “Like I told you,” Norm said. “It all took time to unravel. I started frequenting his haunts and finally settled on a place called Tanks. In the beginning, I didn’t know he worked for the Syndicate. But it wasn’t hard to spot he was working for someone.” Mina understood what the term working meant. Norm had caught on early that this guy did bad things for a living. “He was agitated most of the time, left abruptly, had a new cuff every other week. Tanks is a bar that sells low-quality printed ale. Dark inside, sparse patronage, lots of bots, easy to disappear. It all fit.”

  “How’d you get him to trust you enough to talk?” Lee asked, rapt by the story so far. “A guy like that, you’d think he’d be distrustful and keep to himself.”

  Norm chuckled. “My usual was pretending to overimbibe, then I’d say stuff I knew he’d like to hear. Terrible stuff about women. How much I despised ’em and how useless they were. Fastest way to get a guy like that to talk is to be more awful and hateful than he is. It was the best acting of my career. Watched him swipe my DNA after that. Took a glass I’d been drinking out of and pocketed it. Thought I was too much of a rotting sot to notice. I was ecstatic. I was still on the federal payroll at the time, just barely, and my identity in that sector was Billy Martin, who worked as a sewer cleaner. I even paid out of my own pocket to hire a hacker to layer it deeper, in case Waterbury decided to do a dive. Figured after he checked me out, he’d either stop coming to Tanks altogether, or he’d be even more buddy-buddy. Luckily, it was the latter. Not long after that, I figured out the Syndicate angle. One night, when he left quickly after getting a summons on a brand-new cuff, my partner at the time, Xavier Carter, tailed him. Then we met up. We identified a known Syndicate member passing information to him in a park outside city limits. Have it all on vid. That’s when I got my niece out of the country. The animal-mutilation information came maybe a year or two later.” Norm shook his head. “Waterbury is a pro. Doesn’t talk much. Lets very few things slip. He likes to consume alcohol, but he doesn’t drink too much. So after years of putting in time with this guy, and getting very little, I decided to help him along one evening.” Norm chuckled, leaning back, crossing his arms. “Put a little Blur in his glass. Got him talking about a bunch of stuff, but had to make it seem anecdotal. With Blur, you get relaxed, let your guard down, but you remember what you say. Didn’t want him talking about anything he would regret, because that regret would come right out of my hide. That’s when he told me about a stray cat he’d found and what he did to it.” Norm ran his palm over his face, shaking his head. “Awful stuff. I had to act like doing something like that was normal, and who cares because it’s just a cat. That was the moment I knew I was bringing this guy down if it was the last thing I ever did. It showed me what this guy was capable of. He didn’t just knock women around, which was bad enough, he was a stone-cold killer who enjoyed mutilating defenseless creatures. It took me a long time to work out how to do it. Decided to leave the Syndicate out. All the way out. Best chance I had of getting charges to stick. Unfortunately, the break I needed came after I was forced to retire out of the Marshals Service. Waterbury had told me previously, at least three years prior, that both his parents were dead. Then one night, I made a point to comment that he always had a new cuff, and that had to be a pretty expensive habit to maintain. He mumbled something about his mother’s government pension paying for them. Claimed he liked collecting tech. I had him with that one, as I figured it had to be true. A guy like that doesn’t say no to currency of any kind. But he’d forgotten he told me some time ago that his mother was dead. I had to recruit a few current marshals to do the actual apprehension and subsequent investigation, because I wasn’t on the payroll by then.”

  “Were you ever inside his residence before? The one where he kept you captive?” Mina asked.

  Norm nodded. “Twice. The first time was so he could show me a rare weapon he’d purchased. Happened about six months after we first met. An automatic rifle from about a hundred years ago. When he first bragged about it, I claimed he was lying, since most of those were confiscated and melted down. He was pissed I didn’t believe him. So he took me there to show it to me. No hint of anyone living there with him. Place was sterile. Second time was on the pretense of me setting him up with a woman I knew. This came after I was out of the government, right before he was picked up. Told him I had to connect them personally, on-screen. The role of the woman was played by a marshal by the name of Alice Sweeney. He had no way to get her DNA, and I paid for a very extensive alt. Got me in the door. While he was busy talking to her, I excused myself to use the waste room. Found a large cooling unit in his utility room. Found the animal carcasses. A week later, he was picked up. The marshals knew about the stolen pension and the mutilation, but I left the Syndicate out. I don’t know if it was a good idea or bad, but it’s what I decided on. Before the arrest went down, I tried hard to figure out if he’d offed his parents—his mother, his father, or both. I found no trail. She died of some sort of rare disease several years before I’d met him. Father was MIA in the system. Hadn’t made a DNA swipe in over a dozen years. Nothing conclusive. Waterbury was never supposed to know it was me who was behind his arrest. The plan was to keep me out entirely, but a young rookie messed up during interrogation, and Waterbury saw a recent photo of me. He put two and two in the same column. Added up to the guy who’d been working him over for years. The man was apoplectic. It took three or four marshals to calm him down. After that, I knew my fate.”

  “He was picked up for defrauding the government by keeping his dead mother’s pension borrows,” Mina said, “but you indicated the marshals who nabbed him knew about the mutilation piece. But they didn’t have proof at the time, so they had to obtain a warrant after he was in custody?”

  Norm nodded. “Yeah. Once he found out I was involved, I was able to give testimony about that. The warrant to search the residence came in quick. There was a petition to give him Babble at the time, seeing that both his parents appear
ed to be dead, but we couldn’t prove the father’s death was suspicious. The judge turned down the request. Like I said, the Syndicate never popped its head in to see about this case, unless they had something to do with the truth-serum refusal. Seemed like they didn’t care too much. He was tried and put away in only a few days. The evidence was a lock.”

  “Seven years was a long sentence for what he was accused of,” Mina said. “Did you have anything to do with that?”

  Norm drummed his fingers on the table, raising a single eyebrow. He wasn’t going to comment about that.

  It was enough for Mina.

  She thought about it. “He liked to physically hurt women, along with doling out vile verbal abuse, according to your statement. I’m assuming he spoke about that once or twice over the years. Did he give you any names? Were there any women who tried to press charges and then retracted their testimony? Was he ever in a stable relationship while you two were friendly at Tanks? It doesn’t sound right that he’d have that long of a dry spell.”

  “There were a few women he was close with over the years, for sure. I tried to get their names. Even resorted to inviting him and a date over for dinner. He declined and never said who they were. Attempted to tail him a couple times when I knew he had a date, because he liked to brag, but he always used a drone. Never went anywhere on foot with those poor women.”

  Trailing a craft was almost impossible, as navigating air traffic was hectic, and the drones were piloted by sims. It wouldn’t work unless the drone always set down at a public landing, as a craft needed prior permission to set down. If Waterbury was picking these women up at private residences, Norm wouldn’t have been able to follow or get approval. A craft wasn’t allowed to hover for an indefinite amount of time either.

  Norm leaned forward. “Listen, this guy knows how to keep himself clean. Yeah, he made a mistake leaving the animal carcasses where I could find them. He likes trophies. But he won’t err like that again.” He gestured a hand at Mina in a conceding motion. “But if what I give you here today is enough to catch him, and you make sure he gets a dose of Babble immediately, it might be the ticket you’re looking for. A quick one-two punch. Bring him in, stick him with a syringe. No delay. It just might work.”

  “That’s what we’re hoping for. To make it an absolute lock, we need your testimony coupled with irrefutable evidence.” She shot a glance at Lee. “I know it was risky to try to hack into the satellite that contains vid evidence of Norm’s torture yesterday at Waterbury’s residence, and it would be risky now, but we need that footage. It would be enough to bring him in and put this plan into motion.”

  Upon digging, Lee had found that half of Wilbert’s residential cams, including the ones in the utility room where he had placed Norm, were linked to a private satellite owned by Travis Blade, one of the main bosses of the Syndicate. Waterbury’s desire to keep a recording of his torture of Norm as a keepsake had been a huge mistake.

  Mina continued, “He would have enjoyed perusing that footage again and again after he murdered Norm.” She shot a look of apology at the ex-marshal. He shrugged. “How do we get it? Do we just take a risk and hack in?”

  Lee scratched his head. “I mean, it’s a possibility. We can get it for sure with a hack. But then Waterbury and the mob would have absolute proof we have it. They would have a big heads-up and could begin to refute it before it hits the government airmeld. That kind of hack would be like lighting off a hydro-cracker right in front of their faces.”

  Mina bit her lip. “Hm. That’s not optimal. But we need that feed. It’s all we have to back up Norm’s testimony.”

  “What Waterbury wants is sitting right here,” Lee said, glancing between Mina and Norm. “Like Colonel Kramer suggested yesterday, if we give him another shot at Norm, I’m pretty sure he would take it. This time on our turf. Then we can vid it ourselves.”

  Curious, Mina asked Norm, “You said you had plans in place to take him down. Were you going to gather evidence yourself, then call for backup?”

  Norm was quiet. “Not exactly.”

  When he didn’t readily go on, Mina cocked her head. “It’s helpful to us to know what your plan was.” It wasn’t critical to his testimony, so he didn’t necessarily have to tell them.

  Norm angled his head at the veribox. Mina reached out and shut it off.

  They would continue this off the record.

  He sighed. “My plans didn’t involve either of us surviving.”

  Chapter 5

  Mina couldn’t hide her shock. “You were willing to die to end his life?”

  That was hard to believe. Norm had so many contacts—marshals and other federal agents—who would’ve willingly come to his aid. All he had to do was get this monster on a live feed doing some damage, and agents would’ve stormed the residence.

  Norm shrugged, fiddling with his empty coffee cup. “Ultimately, my plan wasn’t to die, but I knew the chances were high enough. Waterbury wasn’t going to be satisfied with anything except my death, and he was going to make it painful. He was never going to stop pursuing me until he had his end result. He was going to do the deed in a place of his liking. Where he felt secure. Certainly not out in the open. Not at my residence. So I made peace with it. Or at least I tried.”

  “But you had plans in place to try and keep that from happening, right?” Lee asked.

  “I hadn’t received my implants yet. That was a mistake,” Norm said, regret at the forefront. “I should’ve had them put in the day he walked out of that box.”

  “Implants?” Though Mina didn’t want to know.

  “Yes,” Norm answered. “Two. The first was a static locator.” He tapped his forearm. “It was going to be placed here. So you could find me, either before or after. The other was—”

  Mina held up her hand to stop him. Even though the veribox was off, she didn’t want him to utter it out loud.

  “Those are highly illegal.” It wasn’t a question.

  “They are,” Norm said.

  “What are illegal?” Lee asked.

  Mina sighed. She was going to have to inform her partner what was going on, even if she didn’t want to. “Norm was going to have an echo fibrillator implanted.” Norm confirmed with a small nod. “I’m assuming it was voice-activated. Those things are incredibly unstable. In order to take out another person, they need to be right next to you. Like, centimeters away.”

  There weren’t too many implants that could kill another person and leave the person with the implant alive. Technically, echo fibs could do that, but in reality they usually killed both participants.

  Norm leaned forward. “When somebody’s torturing you, they’re usually hovering right over you, if not in your face.” He stopped, his eye catching on something over Mina’s shoulder. He snapped back a moment later. “And that’s exactly what happened. Had I gotten that thing installed, he wouldn’t be alive right now, and you’d have all the evidence you need. Including my prerecorded vid message explaining the plan and the code to find my static location. I figured he’d film the whole thing, so I wasn’t worried about you getting that with a warrant. In the end, you’d have found my battered body, kinda like you did yesterday, and we’d have gone from there.”

  Mina shook her head. “That’s not the way it would’ve gone down. You wouldn’t have survived either.” She glanced at Lee. “You know how an echo fib works, right?”

  “Yeah. It basically nulls a heartbeat. She’s right,” Lee said, “you wouldn’t be able to survive that.” He glanced pointedly at Norm. “Technically, heartbeats pump at similar patterns. Crude tech like that can’t differentiate between two things that are that similar. It wouldn’t discriminate between you and Waterbury. It would shock you both.”

  “Not if you rile somebody up,” Norm argued. “This particular fib is supposed to latch on to the quicker beat. At least that’s what the dealer told
me.”

  Mina crossed her arms, sitting back in her chair. “Another way this could’ve gone is that Waterbury could’ve gagged you. Then you wouldn’t have been able to get out a voice command. He would’ve killed you and would’ve gone free.”

  “Nah. He likes to hear his victim scream,” Norm answered confidently. “Had to go with the implants. They’re coated in silicone and wouldn’t be detected by a wand. He searched me good once he got me back to his residence and only started on the torture once he was satisfied I had nothing on me. I went into that residence like an old farm animal to slaughter.” He visibly shivered. “Implants were the best I had, and I still believe that. Tell me you would’ve done it different.”

  “I’m telling you I would’ve done it different. No question,” Mina said. “I’m here, interviewing you, ready to come up with an alternative plan. One that doesn’t involve any of us dying.”

  “The Syndicate is a sticky wicket,” Norm warned. “They don’t forget. Ever. If I’d gone through with my plan, and survived, it would’ve gone public, exposing them and their fixer. I’d be forced to go into witness protection. The Syndicate would continue looking for me, but since Waterbury had been boxed for the last seven years, my hope was that I’d rank lower on their to-do list. That way, I could stay ahead of the game.”

  Mina didn’t comment. It was clear Norm hadn’t been thinking straight. If he had, he would’ve seen that his plan lacked any real chance of success. She glanced around the restaurant. It was time to get out of here.

  She tapped her cuff, then swung it in front of the borrow slot. She grabbed the veribox off the table and stuffed it in her pocket.