Disclaimer: I own nothing but a dead phone with no battery.
I'm running now.
Night time in Los Angeles is either beautiful or dangerous, depending on whether you're fifteen stories above street level, or at street level.
I'm at street level. More precisely, South Central street level. At 2 am. And I'm chasing an armed man through back alleys in one of the most crime-ridden urban sectors in the United States.
Yeah, this is a bad idea.
The wind whips through my hair. The smell of months-old rat shit and miscellaneous garbage hits me like a wave every time I vault over a dumpster into another alley. My gloves give me good grip, and my running shoes aren't giving up on me yet, which means I'm making good progress.
Unfortunately, the guy in front of me is just as good. He's jumping over obstacles seamlessly, sprinting over slippery films of sewage without stumbling. He springs onto a fence and begins to climb.
He hits the ground on the other side just as I begin climbing. He's about fifteen feet away by the time I land on my feet. And it's just then, as I'm catching my breath after a fifteen-minute pursuit, when I see him stop, turn around, and reach into his coat.
Of course. Fixers are always armed, Omnis be damned.
Since the Omnis system was put into place, gun control in LA had become tighter than a miser's purse. Blume had learned from its mistakes with gang violence and weapons smuggling in Chicago, and had taken a harder line here. What the ctOS failed to do in Chicago, Omnis succeeded at doing in LA: the crackdown on weapons ownerships was brutal and efficient enough to probably send Deep South conservatives into cardiac arrest. Through a thousand security cameras, smart phones, user chat histories and Facebook pages, Omnis sought out any and all civilian firearms with a vengeance. Dad's shotguns were confiscated. Gun stores were shut down. Having a handgun in your pocket meant twenty years in prison, maybe ten for parole. And yes, the lawmakers were on their side, and the right wing was suspiciously quiet. I'm not saying blackmail, but—alright, yes. I am saying blackmail.
So whoever this guy was, he had to have some serious connections to still be packing heat.
Sadly, that meant the equation was now 'unarmed guy vs armed guy.'
What was the saying again? If catapults are outlawed, then only outlaws will have catapults.
Nice work, Omnis.
It's right then, when the silhouette of the .45 emerges from his coat, that I notice the fuse box right next to his head.
My left hand reaches for the phone. The remote profiler—thank heavens for the magnificent piece of software—had already highlighted every relevant moving part in a half-block radius that Omnis had control over. Voltage gates. Safety fuses.
One tap of the screen.
The fuse box explodes like a firework. I brace myself and look on as the fixer is thrown five feet in the air like a ragdoll, before crumpling in a painful-looking heap on the opposite wall.
I march forward. The fuse box sputters and smokes, but I ignore it. Time is short. The bang probably roused every household in five blocks, and the gangbangers, crack heads, and assorted criminal personalities would soon be heading here to investigate. Usually the crack heads get here first. Go figure.
I kick the gun away. He's either knocked out or dead, but either way I don't really care. There's a nasty burn mark on his face—second degree, probably—that's taken away almost all of his eyebrows and a chunk off his cheek.
Ah, there it is.
The flash drive is clutched in his hand. I un-clutch it. And then I pocket it.
And I get the bloody hell away from there.
The flash drive loads up without a hitch. Everything works like a charm; our dear fixer friend hadn't managed to either copy the data or corrupt it beyond recovery before I very politely crashed in on his apartment.
System keys. Phone records. Bank account details.
The laptop screen hurts my eyes. I dim it. The apartment is pitch black because I'm too lazy to turn on the lights.
I've got the keys to an offshore bank account marked 'Zurich.' Eight million bloody dollars. Siphoned off pyramid schemes and investment scams marketed to retirees and poor old ladies. I look down the list. Some of the hits are miniscule, couple of hundred dollars lost, flushed down the drain as far as the victims were concerned. Some of the takings run into the tens of thousands.
I pull up the list of schmucks.
Turns out that Mrs Frei from two blocks down was hit. Sixty-two years old, husband deceased, only daughter in college and struggling with tuition fees and living expenses. She sold off her car and pooled together whatever money she had left in the bank, scrimping together just enough to put dear Rachel through college and possible have some left over for rent in that little old run-down corner lot.
Then eleven thousand dollars vanished overnight. A sound investment, they had told her. Dear old Mrs Frei, an East German immigrant that moved over after the Berlin Wall collapsed, whose only experience with finances for half her life was with food stamps and ration cards, never suspected a thing when she gladly forked over all she had, thinking that she was at last going to make ends meet.
Ding.
Eleven thousand dollars, back in Mrs Frei's account.
I move down the list.
Thirty-five names. Eight million dollars neatly distributed in the end. Wrongs righted, debts repaid. The world turned the right way round, at least for tonight, for thirty five families.
I take a breather. It's four in the morning. I have to be up and about by six thirty.
On the other hand, I spot something interesting. And I do some digging.
Another account. Personal this time, hidden behind a couple of information protection protocols. Twenty million dollars. Possibly belonging to the ringleader of the scam.
So, twenty million dollars. I can get some serious hardware with that. Maybe one of those new scramblers they're chattering about on the Darknet. I'd become invisible to Omnis. Gone for good. Or finally get to pack some heat; something powerful enough to make a difference, but smart enough to skirt round the city's draconian firearm regulations. A pulse pistol—overloads your sensorineural system, sends you into a brief coma, no lasting damage so no bodies on your account. Would have made a difference in that alley tonight.
Instead, I find myself getting to work. Moving down the list, again.
All money leaves a digital footprint. You can't quite erase it. A transaction, after all, is a dollar moving from someone's pocket into someone else's pocket. Which means that a record of it is going to be around somewhere. What I can do, though, is to bury the trail so deep that anybody intending to do any digging would find themselves up for months of work.
Just in case, I plant a handy Trojan in a few neat places. Trip-wires, just in case somebody comes snooping. I need to be careful. Blume had cleaned up its work; the Omnis online monitoring system is like a Rottweiler on roid rage. Leave a trail of crumbs, and Omnis will hunt you down with a ferocity and accuracy that makes ctOS look like a Chihuahua.
The best defence, of course, is making sure the people you're helping don't shoot their mouths off.
Eleven million dollars is now gone. I hope that's all the bastard had left in his account, because payback would be a bitch. In this particular case, my bitch.
I lean back and admire my work.
Mrs Frei just received thirty thousand dollars in her account. Clean as a whistle, untraceable as far as I'm concerned. I smile and hope she finally gets some new clothes. The ones she wears during volunteer work at the homeless shelter look like they were purchased before colour television was a thing.
Just in case, I leave a note. A small appendix to the transfer, set to self-delete after opened. A personal touch to a really impersonal line of work.
"For Mrs Frei. Hope this helps with Rachel's tuition and the car. Don't talk about this, don't ask questions. Make small purchases, nothing too big or too many, too fast.
Yours truly,
R scal
PS. Get a new dress. I hear Imelda's Boutique is having a sale."
Yeah, you probably guessed who I am. If not for the news reports, then the online chatter. 'The vigilante' all over again. Crimes stopped in their tracks by malfunctioning city infrastructure and suspiciously early tips to the police. Online scams blown wide open, the funds recovered and sent back to the victims.
They can't help but connect the dots, can't they? Speculation's running wild, at least over the Darknet. It's Chicago once more. The same guy. The Fox. The Chicago city vigilante, the man who shut down ctOS 1.0, the man who brought Blume to its knees at least for a few months. Aiden Pearce.
Well, sadly, wrong on all counts but one. Well, half, really. I have been in Chicago, but it was a long time ago and too many bad things happened there for me to associate myself in any way with that place. I'm not calling myself the Fox, that's just tacky. I'm not the thug-punching, gun-toting vigilante, because anything more lethal than a BB gun is a prison sentence here in LA.
Also, for the record, Aiden Pearce served eight years in Bolivia as a private military contractor and three years as a freelance fixer, with enough training in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to probably open his own dojo. The man's a sleek killing—or incapacitating—machine, built like a predator, and hunts like one. He's scary, he scares me sometimes. He's a monster in every sense of the word. I'm not. I've got a day job and a life in university. I hit the gym five times a week and do free-running when I can afford the time, but I'm not a soldier. I do my best work from behind a screen, through the network. Tonight's parkour adventure through the streets was probably the most strenuous thing I did in a month. So, no, I'm not some tough son-of-a-bitch like my uncle.
Did I say uncle? Oh yeah.
At least they got the last name right.
My name is Jackson Kent Pearce. Friends call me Jacks. Enemies, and the public, know me as R scal.
Welcome to Los Angeles.
For the record, I unfortunately have no idea at all how hacking works, so forgive me for using technobabble to obscure my ignorance.
I didn't mean to mislead, but unfortunately the character tag isn't exactly accurate since the name did not exist under options. Then again, nobody expects Jacks to show up. Not even Aiden.
Stay tuned.