[summary: aiden accepts a fixer contract]
[takes place in 2003]
_The Fixer
Barely two years ago, Damien had been a very different man. He'd sat up all night in his tiny, messy office and written reports for the cops about his findings on confiscated hard-drives and other hardware. He'd spent years seeing the downside of humanity, the bad kind, the people with neatly arranged child porn folders and the sickos with their own, homemade snuff movies. He'd worked himself through cleverly deleted tax-evasion schemes and piles of blackmail and extortion material.
He'd worked until he was about to expire out of sheer boredom or disgust. He'd paid his taxes and watched the digits on his bank statement each month with increasing anxiety. It wasn't fair, but that hadn't really bothered him. He'd always known life wasn't fair, but it took him years until he'd figured out how to fix it. The answer had been right in front him all that time, he could just reach out and take everything for himself.
Well, his first attempt of living the American dream had landed him in jail, ruined his marriage and now he lived in an ugly, two-story house in the borderlands between the Wards and the Loop, housemates with a man for whom shooting people was the hallmark of a bad Monday.
He was still up and working all night, but things were different this time.
A slowly moving cloud of cigarette smoke hung ominously under the ceiling of the living room. He'd never smoked with Marcus in the house, but now it was just Aiden and his girl upstairs, and they could handle a little smoke just fine. He still didn't smoke when Juliana allowed Marcus to come around, but most of the house had soaked up so many fumes, he could probably inhale for a week without feeling any withdrawal.
Damien hadn't been stupid enough to think life of a criminal was glamourous. It wasn't fast cars and hot women, bling around your neck, gun in your hand. That wasn't how it worked, but it was being your own man, working only for yourself, taking whatever you could get from whoever was dumb enough to let you.
Cars and guns were Aiden's forte, anyway and girls… well, it turned out he was more hung up on Juliana than he liked to let on, much to his secret chagrin and Aiden's not-so-secret amusement.
Phishing sites were the backbone of their income these days, sustaining a healthy trade with stolen IDs and credit card information. Porn, gambling, drugs, anything that made the victims willing to let things slide in the hope of preserving their dignity.
Sometimes, to mix things up, he and Aiden double-teamed the local urban street racing crowd. After all, Aiden had apparently sold his soul for these particular driving skills, so when he said he'd come in third in a race, he would. If he said he'd push another driver to win, he usually did that, too. Made betting on the outcome a breeze, even if it wasn't quite the thrill of an actual gamble.
Damien was working with headphones on. When Greta stayed the night, it tended to be the smart choice. Ostensibly, Greta was a sociology student, but she spent most of her time working for a PI, playing decoy when an attractive one was needed. Damien supposed it was a step up from auctioning off your worn underwear, but college on a shoestring budget was something he had a lot of sympathy for. He didn't quite know where Aiden had picked her up, but she'd been around for a few weeks, long enough that Damien was wondering whether it was something serious and how much of their work he was supposed to hide from her.
Not that he didn't like the girl. She had a pretty face and a dirty mind, something he knew how to appreciate even if he didn't get to benefit. However, she was also ridiculously noisy in bed. He was fairly sure most of their neighbours were going the headphones route, too.
After the first night she'd stayed, Damien had been sarcastic over the breakfast table, but it seemed to have gone right past her. Aiden, meanwhile, had been chuckling into his coffee. He probably agreed, but didn't want to piss her off.
It took a while until the low buzzing of a phone managed to work itself into his awareness and some additional time until he detected the thing stuck between the cushions of the couch.
Damien glared at the phone, pulled his headphones down and put the laptop aside.
He stomped up the stairs, cursing as the phone continued to buzz. Kid hated voicemail so people tended to just keep at it until something happened.
In the semi-darkness, he pushed Aiden's door open, flipped the light switch a few times, then left the light on.
"Hey, kid! Phone!" he yelled.
Juliana had taken most of the furniture when they'd split up, while Aiden's mother had cleared out his old apartment and everything while he was in jail. Even months later, Aiden still only owned a dresser, a bed and a lamp on the floor in a corner. He and Greta had still managed to make a mess of the room, pieces of clothes strewn everywhere. The bed was a mess, too. A thatch of red hair and a pale, freckled foot was all that was visible of Greta. Aiden himself was on his stomach, upside down, sprawling on the bed and tangled in the sheets. He was dangerously close to simply dropping over the edge when he lifted his head and cast a bleary-eyed frown toward the door.
"You left your fixer phone in the couch," Damien said. "I told you not to feed the poor thing."
He didn't give Aiden any warning before he tossed the phone at him, but didn't receive the satisfaction of seeing the device bounce off his hard head. Aiden caught it, albeit awkwardly. He glanced at the phone, then rolled off the bed, taking the blanket with him. He came to sit on the floor and picked up the call, but only to say, "Call you back in a minute."
He took a deep breath and leaned his head back, glowering at Damien.
The girl was beginning to stir, too, goosebumps had sprung up on her exposed skin.
"… sorry," Aiden said slowly, as if he'd just remembered it. "What time is it?"
Damien shrugged, pushed his shoulder into the doorway, letting his gaze pass over Aiden and settle on the girl.
"Half past three," he said.
Aiden rubbed his hand down his face and yawned, stretched his arms out over his head.
"Are you still working?" he asked. He picked himself up, tossed the bed-sheet over his shoulder and arms like a toga.
"One of us has to be the breadwinner," Damien said.
Greta curled to her side, still half-asleep and groped around blindly for where the blanket had gone. When she came up empty, she finally woke up fully. She lifted an arm and put it over her eyes shading them from the light as she peered around the room.
"What…?" she mumbled.
Aiden gave a quick glance, but didn't say anything. Instead, he pushed past Damien and out in the hallway, phone back by his ear as he walked.
"What is it?" he demanded in a vaguely menacing tone of voice. Of course, he'd lose most of that intimidation if whoever was on the other end of the line knew he was wearing a blanket, rifling through the fridge and about to drink from the milk carton.
"Don't you have people for that?" Aiden asked and after a moment, "Okay. What do you need?"
Greta sat up and brushed strands of hair from her face, blinked again in the light and twitched when she registered Damien still lingering in the doorway.
She snapped her legs together and pulled her knees in, snatched up the pillow she'd been sleeping on and clutched it to her, giving Damien a glare.
Damien glanced over his shoulder, raised his voice so Aiden could hear him in the kitchen below.
"So she is a real redhead," he remarked.
"Yeah, aren't you really glad you didn't make that bet?" Aiden called up, before he continued his conversation. "I'll need forty minutes."
Greta glared harder, "Do you mind?" she asked acidly.
Damien grinned, "More into black myself, but if Aiden's done with you…"
"Aiden's done with her," Aiden said as he pushed back past Damien and went to his dresser. So maybe he wasn't too serious about her, after all. Must be her constant shrieking.
"Hey, you can't just pass me around like that," Greta growled, looking away from Damien to focus on Aiden.
He'd picked his clothes, piled them in one hand and took a long step to the bed. He leaned down and picked up her chin with the tips of his fingers, smirked a little and kissed her slowly until she forgot she was angry with him.
"Relax," Aiden smirked. "He just got dumped. All he's up to is some cuddling."
Damien gave her his best leer, "Yeah, hardcore cuddling."
Aiden pulled back, but Greta snapped her hand up and fisted it into the blanket, dragging it loose from around him. Aiden rolled his eyes, but let her have it, standing back from the bed to get dressed.
With the blanket around her shoulders and still behind the shield of the pillow, Greta relaxed, leaned back into the wall above the bed, meeting Damien's gaze somewhat more playfully than before.
Damien shrugged and withdrew out into the hallway, making his way back to his laptop, but Aiden caught up with him on the stairs, already fully dressed and looking somewhat presentable, combing his fingers through his tangled hair.
"I need to do a pickup for an old client," Aiden said. "Her normal guy's gone missing, something more's going on."
"I hope there's a bonus in it, then," Damien pointed out.
"Your worry just warms my heart," Aiden remarked.
They stopped by the front door and Aiden pulled his gun holster and jacket from the untidy pile constituting the wardrobe. He flipped the bright red gun in his hand before he put it away, gave a little pleased smirk.
"Oh? I need to worry about you now?" Damien inquired lightly. "Lost all your edge in the last… uh, seven hours? I knew that girl was bad for you."
"Yes, Daddy," Aiden quirked an eyebrow, but grew serious. "But can you stay up? I may need some backup."
"Still need to finish that site anyway," Damien said. "Entertain your redheaded girl. You'll hear it if we get along."
More seriously, he added, "Gonna be there, just call."
"Thanks," Aiden said and left.
After a moment, the roar of his bike broke through the comparative quiet of the late-night-early-morning.
Damien glanced up the stairs, could just make out the edge of Aiden's bed through the open door.
"Hey, girl!" he called. "I'm gonna order something to eat, you want something?"
There was a moment of silence, then the whispering of blankets. A moment later, Greta appeared at the door, wrapped tightly in the blanket, looking down on him.
"Sushi," she said.
"Sushi? Raw fish wrapped in algae?" Damien asked. "At three in the morning?"
"What makes sushi more weird than pizza?" Greta asked back. "At three in the morning?"
Damien considered it, then shrugged, "Good point."
Belinda Mitchell owned a small chain of art galleries in Chicago. Most of her business was legit, but she considered it her duty to fence stolen art or help move clever forgeries. She had been one of Aiden's first serious clients when he was starting out as a fixer, a business that relied almost exclusively on hearsay, before the Grid took off. Without Mitchell's trust and recommendation, things would have been significantly harder.
Since getting out of jail, he didn't usually take these kinds of jobs anymore. He didn't want to be set up for another stay in an intensive care unit only to be transferred straight behind bars. He wouldn't let that kind of mistake happen again and besides, cybercrime was the future.
For Mitchell, though, Aiden was willing to make an exception. He owed her that much.
Most of his past jobs for her had been pickup or delivery jobs, the odd situation where he had to stand menacingly behind her shoulder to aid in her negotiation. He'd knee-capped a would-be buyer, once, who thought he was going to double-deal a middle-aged lady in an elegant designer costume.
Mitchell had a steel core and a keen business sense, it wasn't her style to call in the middle of the night and ask him to come without much preamble or explanation. She had several people working for her, most of them on the regular payroll, she'd go to them before she turned to Aiden.
Aiden parked his bike a small distance away, checked the camera angles before he got off and strode to the back of Mitchell's gallery. It was shuttered up for the night, steel bolts on the back as well as the front. He heard the solidity of the door in the low thud his knock caused.
Waiting, he took a step back and tucked his hands into his pockets, surveyed the backstreet in all direction. Two dark cars were parked close by, under signs marking them as reserved for employees of the gallery. One was no doubt Mitchell's Adamant, the other was a shiny new compact car.
He turned his attention back to the door when he heard it unlock. It was pushed open only wide enough to see a narrow pale face hover in the dark of the badly-lit hallway behind.
"Are you… uh… Pearce?" the young man answered.
"No, I'm the big bad wolf," Aiden answered dryly. "What do I look like?"
The man hesitated, blinked several times and seemed to blanch a little more.
Mitchell's voice called from inside, "Don't stand there like an idiot! Let him in!"
The man stepped back, gave Aiden ample room to step into a narrow hallway. Another man stood in the shadows there, taller and broader and noticeably less nervous than the first. He gave Aiden a short nod, gaze passing over him and into the empty alley behind him.
"Thank god you're here," Mitchell greeted him as he walked into the storeroom, the nervous young man followed him.
"What happened?"
"I'm expecting a delivery tonight, but the man who was supposed to pick it up, he has vanished."
Aiden studied her. Carefully applied makeup cracking like fine marble, dried up after a long day. He sensed her annoyance with his silence, but took it, waiting for her to continue.
Several emotions crossed Mitchell's face, from vaguely annoyed to worried to disgusted. She passed her gaze over the young man before she returned it to Aiden, narrowed her eyes and said, "My assistant went by his place and it had been trashed. There was blood in the kitchen, but no trace of him. He had the sense not to call the police, but I'm sure the neighbours will have done so by now. Any investigation will no doubt eventually lead to me and I would like to have this deal out of the way. Neater that way."
"Why do you need me?"
Mitchell stared at him for a long minute, face hard in the white light of the lamp above her. A small smile broke her expression briefly.
"Plausible deniability. You're an independent agent. Whatever you do, it's on you." Her expression softened just a little. "But that's only relevant if you're caught. I don't expect you to be."
He returned her gaze steadily until she let the moment drop, turned away and walked a few steps to a laptop set up on a metal table.
"Apart from this hard to quantify hiccup, it shouldn't be difficult. I have my arrangements with an employee at the port, all you've got to do is hand over this envelope," she held up the brown paper, wrapped around a bundle of money. "Take the package and put it in the car, come back here."
"Hard to quantify?" Aiden repeated, intrigued despite himself. He liked the digital networks, the smart devices, he thought he might even like Blume's ctOS, because the street was finding its own uses for it and he had the finger right on the pulse. But he hadn't forgotten what reality felt like, either, and sometimes the virtual just wasn't as satisfying.
Mitchell looked back at him, one perfect eyebrow arched questioningly high. "Are you going to do it? Or do I have to go fishing for another fixer?"
Aiden shook his head. "I'll need some more details."
Mitchell studied him, too professional to start talking money this early, but clearly expecting him to do so. When the silence started to become uncomfortable, Mitchell glanced down at her laptop, but didn't do anything with it.
"Five paintings are being shipped from Toronto to a non-existent address. The package is currently in storage at the port, where someone I pay good money to expects to hand it over to the right person. As I've already said, that's all there is to it."
"What's special about it?"
Mitchell pressed her lips together, looked annoyed and impatient for a no more than a second before she schooled her features. "I don't know," she said.
Aiden shook his head. "But you have an idea."
She took a deep breath, tried to stare him down briefly, but finally relented.
"The acquisition of these paintings was a little… messy. They were stolen from a private collector who, I'm afraid, has some connections of his own. I bought the paintings from someone who desperately wanted to be rid of them and had no time or inclination to negotiate a fair deal."
She paused, clearly to give him a chance to fill in the obvious details if he wished, but he wanted to hear it from her.
"I assume someone else is after these paintings."
Aiden thought it through for a moment, then nodded slowly.
"I'll need the names," he said. "Your man at the port and your missing one, including his address."
Mitchell nodded, but glanced down at her watch and her mouth narrowed to a thin line.
"My assistant will text you the information," she said and Aiden saw the young man jump from the corner of his eyes.
Mitchell gave Aiden a hard look, keeping his attention fixed on her.
"But we lost enough time already. You should be on your way."
"I'll need a car," Aiden said.
Mitchell's heels made precise little clicking sounds as she walked across the room to a small cabinet, opened it and took out a set of keys.
"Dark blue van," she explained as she returned to him. "Parked in the garage. You don't have to worry about it, it's clean."
Aiden slipped on a pair of thin driving gloves before he took the keys from her hand. She arched her brows as she watched him, but didn't comment on it further.
"That's what I like to hear."
He took a last look around, then strode from the room quickly and made his way to the garage. On the way, he pulled out his phone. Information on the two men had already arrived and he forwarded everything to Damien, then called him.
"You got it?" he asked.
"Yep, let me guess, you want all their dirty little secrets?" Damien asked, audibly speaking through a mouthful of food. Some guitar music playing in the background, a female voice singing.
"Don't need that much. One's gone missing from his home, tap into the cameras see if there's anything going on around his place in the last 24 hours. I'm gonna meet the other one, just make sure he's not a rat. I'd like to know if he's got any gang connections, too. And, for fuck's sake, don't make Greta listen to that wailing you call music."
"I'm a man of wealth and taste," Damien pointed out, clearly grinning. "Unlike you, Greta actually appreciates that. Stop insulting my music, your ignorance is showing."
"I'll always make time to insult your music," Aiden said. He'd rounded the van once, making sure everything looked good at least to his cursory inspection. The dark blue van was parked along several similar ones, but it was the only one without Mitchell's logo decorating the sides. It was the same blue, though, a fit of vanity Mitchell might end up regretting.
Aiden gave an inward shrug, it wasn't going to come crashing down tonight. He climbed into the van, took it out into the street as the first murky glow of morning collided with the remnant smog glow above the city.
"It's called 'self-reflection', you know," Damien said. "The thing where you realise your own shortcomings and accept the judgement of your betters. Especially when it comes to music."
"Are you even working back there?"
"I can hack the traffic cameras with one hand tied behind my back," Damien announced. He was still chewing, though, and somewhere in the background, Greta was trying to sing along to the music, though she didn't speak any Portuguese and it was just more wailing as a result. In the privacy of the dark car, Aiden pulled a face.
"It's called hubris, Damien," he remarked. "It's gonna get you in the end."
"I hear you complain, but you lap it all up like it's ambrosia."
"So did your half-assed hacking get anything yet?"
"One-handed," Damien corrected, taking another bite of whatever it was he was eating. "Half-assed is your result when you try to hack anything better protected than a calculator."
"Hey, if you don't have anything, just say so," Aiden said cheerfully. "I'll only judge you forever."
"I'm going to disappoint you, my boy," Damien said immediately. "Now here's a man just asking for it. A bit shady and stupid enough to scatter hints of it all over his online profiles. Sometimes they make it so easy, it's beautiful. He's got a habit of running errands for everyone who'll pay him."
Damien recited a long list of the man's involvement with various fixers, even some Club members and a handful of gang-bangers, but it was nothing Aiden hadn't expected. He suspected the man had some more serious secret stashed away somewhere, a gambling or drug habit, maybe a lover, or perhaps an entire family he needed the additional money for. There was nothing there to suggest he'd sell Mitchell, though. Small fry like that usually didn't have the guts to cheat the bigger players.
He heard Damien typing, sometimes, he'd mutter to himself, some curse or comment as he hacked his way through the network. Greta had stopped singing and seemed to have sat down by Damien's side. If she managed to make sense of what Damien was doing, Aiden would be impressed and slightly worried, but the worst Greta would do to either of them was write an essay about career criminals for one of her classes.
It'd be quicker to take the Skyway to the port, but Aiden preferred the comparable anonymity of avoiding the toll and their additional eyes and cameras. He still had no idea what was going to happen and just how badly it could go south, Aiden preferred to leave as few traces as possible for the cops to sniff out later.
Traffic control backed up its recording to a server farm somewhere below Blume HQ up in Pawnee and Blume had a solid layer of protection wrapped around it. He and Damien had established reliable access to the live-feeds, but the recordings took some time for Damien to crack.
"And now things get interesting," Damien said, whistling in surprise. "I have no cameras inside the apartment building, but there is a man entering the building, around 9pm yesterday. Comes out two hours later."
"What's interesting about him?"
"He's not in the Profiler database. That's some professional work. Not half bad, but of course this kind of manipulation is just asking for someone to take an interest. He obviously has something to hide."
"He's a fixer."
"No shit Sherlock," Damien snorted. "So… about half an hour after Captain Obvious leaves, a few workers go in and come out carrying suspiciously unmarked boxes, but they happen to be large enough for a body, if it's been chopped up a little."
"Cleanup?"
"I'm not so much into the dirty work myself, that's what I have you for, but yes, that's exactly what it looks like."
Aiden considered.
"What's the story, kid?"
Aiden made a noncommittal sound before he answered, assembling the pieces as he went.
"Someone hired a fixer to intercept the pickup tonight," he said slowly. "He got to the man in his home, beat up on him a little until he spilled the details. Mitchell's a smart businesswoman, but I'm sure her employees know what's going on. So, this guy tells the fixer everything, fixer kills him, hires a few guys from lower down on the totem pole to clean up after him."
Damien chuckled darkly, "You've been there?"
"Bottom of the totem pole? Sure, but then I turned ten and people learned to toe the line."
Damien chuckled again and Greta joined in.
"Listen," Aiden said. "I'll be another fifteen minutes to the port. Do you think you can access the cameras there? Get a look at what's going on?"
"Port is on a separate network," Damien pointed out, didn't sound too thrilled about it. "I hear Blume has plans to link it up to the rest next year."
"Yeah, not waiting that long. Can you do it or not?"
"What? Or you'll do it yourself?" Damien sniggered.
"Don't make me. I only have a phone, it'd be a bitch and take too long."
"The way you hack? Definitely."
"Oh? And who cracked your password in under sixty seconds last weekend?"
Damien didn't answer, but failed to suppress a frustrated grunt.
"I'm waiting for that answer. Who did? Come on."
"It's not really hacking if you just guess the password."
Aiden grinned a little, though there was no one there to see it.
"Hacked you," Aiden finished in Damien's stead. "Still hacking."
"Let's see you do that to the port network, my boy."
"Not in fifteen minutes," Aiden said. "You like to talk when you drink, Damien. Fair warning for next time."
There was another moment of silence, then something brushed over the mic on Damien's end and the background tinkling of music faded away as Damien left the living room. Aiden heard the basement door, then the music was gone. Damien scratched a chair over the floor.
"Give me twenty-five," Damien said, rapidly tapping on the keyboard.
"Good enough, this once," Aiden said. "But send me a pic of the fixer, I'd like to know who I'm going up against."
Damien only grunted an affirmative and barely a minute later, Aiden's phone announced the arrival of a new message.
He picked up the phone, summoned the picture and stared at the blurry shot. It didn't have much detail, the fixer had been constantly in motion while he was within range of the camera. He was a tall man, athletic, dressed in some kind of pale suit. Aiden hadn't expected to recognise him, fixers weren't too sociable, even if they worked together for a job.
He tossed the phone to the passenger seat, flexed his hands on the wheel, but forced himself to slow down. There was no point to get to the port before Damien had found a way in.
End of _The Fixer – Part 1
References:
"... the street finds its own uses for things" Burning Chrome by William Gibson
Damien is listening to Fado, but quoting the Rolling Stones, go figure.
Revised on 03/May/2016 and 29/Nov/2016