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Anderson double checked his screen. "Yeah this is the place. Negative Zero… What a name."
"Ok we don't have time to mess around, I'll do the talking, you translate anything technical. Got it?"
Zach nodded. Man she was fierce when she was taking charge. "Yes ma'am."
They hopped out of the SUV and headed into the store. There was a young guy standing in the middle of the sales floor, straightening up the boxes of video cards. "What can I do for you today miss?"
Eames showed him her badge. "You can tell me if you were online about 30 minutes ago telling people all about your intrusion program that someone paid you a whole bunch of money for earlier today."
"Hey I don't know anything about that. I sell custom boxes, not programs!"
"No, see, our technical unit traced your IP address to this location. So if it wasn't you, is there someone else here that could have been using the computer?"
"Maybe… Lots of people stop in, hang out…. You know how it is."
"Ok well I see you have camera up on the wall there, so maybe we'll just have a look at the tape and see who was in here in the last half hour. If you were alone, we'll know it was you and then you will have wasted all of our time. Then we'll have to go to the station, and your store will have to be closed, and your computers searched…"
"Ok ok! Alright, if I help you out, will that make you forget about me?"
"Well if we're busy chasing down this guy, I don't think we'll have time to think about you anymore."
"Good enough. There was a woman in here first thing this morning. Wanted heavy duty stuff. A terminal, a few programs, some ICE, laser pointer, PDA, patch cables, I mean really, the WORKS. I showed her some stuff we had up front but she didn't want it. Said she was looking for Chromebook type stuff. Dropped me a wad of cash to cough up the super custom gear I had in the back."
"Ok, did she say WHY she needed the stuff?"
"Uhh… Yeah! She said it was a rescue mission. I thought that was pretty weird. I mean who does stuff like that?"
"Give us a description and we're gone."
"Yeah, about 5'8", dark green pants, dark blue shirt, black jacket, boots, bright red hair, a little pale."
"Eyes?"
"Sunglasses. But… She was weird. I mean like I don't know how, but I got the wiggins just being in the room with her. Like she was eyeing me up for dinner or something, even though she barely looked at me and never took off her shades."
"That's nice. Anything else that would make her stand out? Tattoos, birthmark, scars?"
"Not that I could see. Long pants, long sleeves, t-shirt collar."
Zach could see Eames was wrapping up but still needed to know more. He jumped in, "What do you mean by Chromebook type stuff?"
"I mean like from the Cyberpunk game, the catalogs that you could shop for extra gear out of. All the real heavy duty cyberware kinds of things. Hyper-advanced, well at the time they were, and now it's more fact that fiction. Cutting edge, and some of it's still out there, but a lot of its real now. Come on dude you know what I'm talking about, right?"
"Yeah. I just wanted to be sure we were talking about the same thing. I need a list of everything you sold her. Everything. Or we may just remember to stop back by here later on."
"Ok ok, man," the kid said holding up his hands in surrender, "I feel you. I swear I didn't know what she was planning to do. I don't want this mess coming back on me."
"So," Eames said, "in all the time she was sitting around here, waiting for you to finish getting her order together, she never once mentioned her plans?"
"Nothing beyond what I told you before, that it was a rescue mission."
Eames looked incredulous. "And you didn't think to ASK maybe?"
The kid gave a WTF is she thinking look to Zach before replying. "You don't ask for details. If someone wants to tell you how great they are, they will. If not, it's better to keep it on the DL. The only reason I asked her what she was after in the first place was because I thought she was some corporate raider, going to clean out some bank accounts or something."
"So… You DID ask her what she was doing?"
"Uhh… Well… Ok yeah I asked, because I thought there was going to be a big payout, I figured maybe I could get a cut. I was trying to play the chiX0r, I didn't think she was that good. Then she got mad and told me to fuck off and said that there wasn't any money and she wasn't a goddamn thief."
Anderson looked up sharply, "She said those exact words? 'I'm not a goddamn thief'?"
"Yeah man. That's a direct quote."
Eames looked at Zach, then back to the kid. "I think you should hurry up and get that sales list for us. Now."
"I'm gone," he said and vanished into the back.
"So Anderson, what's important about her saying that she's not a thief?"
"Malicious hackers mostly like to do one of two things: Steal or destroy. She didn't do a thing to hurt our systems when she broke in. She could have caused all kinds of chaos for the whole city, the kind they really like to sit back and watch, but she left everything right where she found it. She made copies, but didn't erase a single bit of data. Now she's stated, forcefully, that she's not interested in stealing from anyone."
"So, it supports the prison break theory. A professional who only does what they have to do to get the job done. No bragging online and no drawing extra attention to themselves by nuking our system."
"My thoughts exactly."
"Now we just have to FIND her." She turned towards the back of the store. "Hey kid! Hurry the hell up or I'm coming back there!"
In the back of the store, the young man was indeed complying with Specialist Anderson's request, but at the same time was also engaged in another task.
He had found video in the sales floor camera of the two cops that showed their faces clearly and plucked out a couple stills from the video file. He packed them into another file on his desktop and opened up the hacking program he had sold the redheaded woman. As he finished making a hard copy list of the equipment he sold to her, he made a few little tweaks in the code of the hack program, and saved a new copy to a flash drive. After that, he quickly copied some information from a few other small programs he had running. Then he used the original version to send the pictures and a little note pinging out across the web, looking for it's codemate.
Never let it be said that Negative Zero didn't take very good care of his customers.
He heard the lady cop yelling towards the back of the store and, gathering the all the copies he had made of everything, carefully shut down his computer and walked to the waiting detective.