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14

THE STAFF

R ucker’s house staff were waiting for us when we pulled past the iron gates that separated his San Francisco estate from the street. Black took us up the Pacific Heights driveway to the six-story dwelling Rucker listed as his main residence in the United States, and the staff stood there in a line, like something out of an Eighteenth Century novel.

Black parked the SUV just to the left of the massive front door.

One of Rucker’s employees tried to take the keys from Black when we climbed out of the SUV, but Black waved him off with a glare. Another offered to take Nick’s umbrella, and Nick growled at him. The servant paled and backed away in alarm.

Nick only closed the umbrella once he stood under the stone and glass outcrop that sheltered the massive front doors from the midday sun. He hung the round handle on his forearm, and looked out over the Japanese-style garden while Black and I joined him.

No one offered to take anything else from us.

Stone urns with manicured cypress that reminded me of bonsai trees stood on either side of the front door, and a stone and glass, life-sized statue of what looked like a man on fire stood at the end of the black-tile stoop, clearly visible from most of the driveway. The stone part of the statue appeared to be marble, and the glass had been threaded through with colored fibers that rippled with gold and red light, clearly meant to be flames.

Nick grunted when he saw the statue, then glanced at me, tilting his head towards it.

“Prometheus?” he mused. “Or Icarus?”

I gave him a wry smile back. “Maybe just ‘man on fire’?” I mused.

The staff member wearing the most expensive suit of the bunch (butler? assistant? valet?) stood just inside the door. He either didn’t hear Nick’s sarcasm, or chose to ignore it.

“It is meant to symbolize Prometheus, sir, yes,” the man sniffed. “Very good.”

“Good doggie,” Black muttered, nudging Nick’s back.

Despite Black putting some muscle into it, he didn’t manage to move the stone-like vampire body even a millimeter.

“I’ll get you a cookie later, little doggie,” Black smirked.

“Try feeding me a fucking cookie and see what happens to you, Quentin,” Nick grunted.

“I might pay to see that,” I murmured.

Black glared at me. “Of course you would.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re being completely ridiculous, you know,” I scolded, suddenly fed up with his jealousy about Nick. “You’re a very bad doggie, Quentin. No cookie for you. And I’m holding you to your promise of buying us lunch. I’m picking the restaurant.”

Nick chuckled, and smirked at Black. When Black glared at him, Nick held up his gloved hands, that smirk still on his vampire lips.

“Don’t look at me, numb-nuts. She said it.”

The servant looked at Black, then at Nick, then at me, and blinked.

He didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed.

“The piece was done as a personal favor by the artist, Elind Forninque,” the human haughtily informed us, going on as if none of us had said anything since his last comment. He looked at Black, as if somewhere in that exchange, he’d decided Black was the person who mattered out of the three of us. “You are familiar with his work, sir?”

“No,” Black said. “Never heard of him.”

I coughed, but managed to mostly keep a straight face.

My lips might have twitched.

I knew for a fact Black was lying, that he absolutely knew both the artist and his work. Forninque was the featured creator for the one and only fundraiser we’d attended since we got back from Fiji. It had been a revoltingly expensive, seven-course dinner held after-hours at the San Francisco MOMA. Black met Fornique that night, and handed him a check, and the two of them even seemed to know one another a little.

“Is he French?” I asked innocently. “He sounds French.”

“Probably,” Black said, dismissive.

“Ah, no. He is not French.” The butler? manservant? executive assistant? stared between the three of us again. That time, I saw a horrified disbelief in his eyes. “He is Swiss.”

“Is that different?” Nick asked, voice bored. He made a kind of swirling motion with his hand. “All roughly the same area, right?”

The servant’s jaw dropped more.

Did he really not know we were fucking with him?

Probably not. He didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor.

The valet’s lip curled just the slightest bit, but he only bowed as we approached the door, and swung the heavy panel wider.

I strongly suspected I would hate this place, even before I saw the oversized, gaudy statue of a naked woman painted red and yellow, like Ronald McDonald, which someone had placed at the foot of the stairs.

More statues peeked out of nearby alcoves, accented with red and gold recessed lights. No discernible element unified them, not in style, or theme, or even color. Potted marijuana plants and banana trees stood under large windows overlooking the drive, as well as a steel humidor that sat on a table shaped like an elephant’s leg.

Or maybe it was an elephant’s leg. I didn’t get close enough to verify, either way, mostly because the thought of it made me want to barf.

A bright red couch in the shape of a women’s parted lips was visible in a wallpapered room to our right, just past a tiger-skin rug that didn’t look particularly fake, either. To the left I glimpsed a fireplace, more chrome and red, another animal rug, and black leather furniture. What looked like a real, adult giraffe had been stuffed and mounted on a red leather stand, which gave me some idea of the height of the room. To the right of the staircase in front of us, a roaring lion’s head hung on the wall, along with a zebra head, a bison, a moose, a wolf, and a leopard.

I stopped looking after that, although I saw more heads across from those.

Everything about the place felt dead to me, apart from the plants.

Maybe it was all the animal corpses.

“Would you like a tour?” the butler/valet asked, his nose higher in the air.

“No.” Black looked the man over and seemed to dismiss him in those few seconds. “They told you the score? His lawyer, and that C.E.O. from Prometharis? I was told I had full run of the place. Gorren said I could look at anything I wanted, access any part of the house I needed to conduct my investigation. We’ve all signed N.D.A.s,” Black added.

I managed to keep my expression flat.

That woman at Prometharis hadn’t said anything of the kind.

She’d pretty much said the opposite.

Moreover, she’d very specifically stated that Black wasn’t to touch any computers or access any of the personal vaults Rucker had in the house while we was here.

We especially weren’t supposed to enter any rooms that housed portions of Rucker’s research projects, or anywhere that was obviously his “personal” space. She called out several areas in particular, as explicit no-go zones: Rucker’s private office on the second floor, some kind of “personal” space he had in the basement, which apparently Rucker used as a private entertainment area and study, and the master bedroom on the top floor.

Which made me wonder why Gorren thought we should bother to come here at all.

Obviously, I knew why Black wanted to come.

I’d assumed from the beginning that we’d have to push staff to get access, and essentially force our way in. I had zero doubt that Gorren already communicated her orders to Rucker’s employees, since they’d clearly been waiting for us when we arrived.

I was surprised, therefore, and maybe a little disappointed, when the man in the expensive suit only bowed. His distaste for us remained clear, but he clearly had no intention of trying to stop us. Maybe Nick managed to intimidate them. Or maybe they’d called for backup, and Morgan and his security people were on their way from Oyster Point already.

That, or, more likely, Gorren wasn’t as concerned about the house as she pretended.

Maybe she thought there was nothing here that mattered.

“Very good, sir,” the valet said dryly. “Then I shall get out of the way of you and your team. Please pick up any of the telephones you find around the house and dial ‘6-6-6’ if you require the assistance of someone on our staff.”

My eyes rolled of their own accord.

I heard Nick snort derisively, too.

“I doubt we will.” Black smirked at the human. “…But I’ll keep it in mind.”

The butler-valet-housekeeper-assistant bowed a last time, then removed himself, walking away with his hands clasped at the base of his spine.

He didn’t look back.

I spared a thought, briefly, about the likelihood that we might get him fired, or possibly all of these people fired, in the process of us bulldozing our way into Rucker’s house. We might have put Wicker in a bad position already, if not gotten him fired, as well.

It was difficult to care, given who they worked for.

That might not have been fair, but it was how I felt.

I’d never met this Lucian Rucker, never thought about him once, or wondered about him in any way before today, but I found myself hating him already.

I knew, somehow, that feeling would only intensify before this was over.

“ A nything?” Black asked about an hour later. He hovered over me as I scanned through folders in Rucker’s computer.

I glanced up at him with a frown.

“I’m not going through the actual information, you know,” I reminded him. “I’m mostly just copying everything onto the external drive and sending it to Kiko and Alisha. We have no idea how soon someone might show up here and try to shut us down… I figured the priority was to get it all back to the office.”

“Yes,” Black conceded. “It is.”

I continued to frown at him.

His mind seemed to be elsewhere right now. Was he worried about someone breaking in on us here? Making us stop?

“A little,” he conceded, glancing down at me. “I’d feel better if we knew why they let us in here so easily.” Black glanced around the office with a frown. “It’s likely a pipe dream, but I’d hoped to find one of those implants here… an early prototype maybe, possibly in a safe or a locked glass case or something. Rucker seems like the type who’d want a physical token of his favorite tech as a display or a talking piece.”

I nodded, feeling my shoulders relax marginally.

I agreed with his assessment about Rucker.

“I could try going through some of this while I copy it over,” I said, doubtful. “But honestly, I think it would be faster to have Alisha and Jem do it. We’ll likely need at least one engineer to look at it as well, likely someone who specializes in biotech. The organic machines side would have to be Jem, too, right?”

“Probably, yes,” Black conceded. “Holo knows a bit, but Jem’s the expert.”

I waved a hand towards the monitor. “Anyway, there’s too much security on most of these files for me to be able to see much from here. I doubt I’d get past the encryption I’ve found on individual documents, or be able to understand most of it, even if I did.”

“Have you finished uploading everything?” Black asked.

“No,” I said.

“How long?” Black asked.

My eyes flickered to the progress bar. “Twenty minutes?” I guessed. “It kind of depends on whether we find more hard drives––”

But Black had already touched his ear.

“Nick? Where are you with your search? Anything interesting?”

The channel was open between all three of us, so I heard Black’s voice through my earpiece, as well as from him standing next to me.

There was a dense silence on the other end.

Then a scuffling sound.

I heard what might be a soft chink of metal on metal, but hollow-sounding, like he was underground. Where the hell was he? Inside a safe?

Out of nowhere, I heard hard breathing, but Nick didn’t breathe. I also heard low vocalizations, what could be human, and female. Those definitely didn’t sound like Nick. They sounded young, and higher-pitched, and definitely not like Nick at all.

It might even be an animal.

“What the fuck was that?” Black asked, clearly hearing it, too.

Nick’s voice rose, strangely loud after that other, softer, more animal sounds.

I realized now that it sounded like whimpering.

Or crying, maybe.

Something in that knowing chilled me to the bone.

“You’d better get up here.” Nick sounded grim. “Both of you. I could use Miri right now, especially, but both of you need to come up here as soon as you can.”

Black’s voice instantly matched Nick’s tone.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Upstairs. In the master bedroom… I think. This whole floor is basically one giant room with several balconies and a bathroom the size of the entire fucking apartment I had in South San Francisco. The one Miri said always smelled like brine-soaked guy-socks.”

I grunted a half-laugh, unable to help it.

“It did smell like that,” I informed him.

“Which floor?” Black asked.

“The very top. It’s the only room on this floor, like I said, apart from that massive fucking bathroom and a sauna. Oh, and there’s a big outdoor garden and an attached sunroom, but again, they’re, like, connected to the bedroom. Just walk straight ahead when you get to the top of the stairs. I’ll be on the left past the first partition. Near a balcony. On the floor.”

Black clicked off the comm. He frowned down at me.

“Can you leave that?” he asked, nodding towards the three screens I sat in front of. “Will it continue to copy everything over while we’re not here?”

I glanced up from where I’d been poring over file names, double-checking that I’d gotten everything, that there wasn’t anything hidden I’d missed. Black and I found the office not long after we’d snooped through most of the ground floor and walked up to the second.

We hadn’t looked through much apart from the computers, although Black had searched the walls and floors for a safe. Brushed steel bookshelves lined two of the walls, but I got the feeling the books themselves were mostly for show. The centerpiece to the room was the massive desk where I sat, dominated by the three curved screens and two different keyboards.

When we first came in, we’d found a number of controls that Black theorized turned the room into an augmented reality space when paired with a tablet, or possibly Rucker’s implant. After toying with those, Black reached into his jacket and tossed me a small external drive. He told me to copy everything I could find so we could go through it all back at the office.

I’d worried the drive would be too small, but he informed me it could hold several hundred terabytes of data.

Even so, I called Kiko about moving everything to a company server, just in case.

She gave me an address and I started with that, but Black’s external drive seemed capable of holding it all too, so I started that one as well, figuring, if nothing else, it might provide a decoy if someone from Rucker’s team showed up and had a shit-fit about what we were doing.

Honestly, though, I figured the risk was minimal.

Unless half the company wore those implants, or Rania Gorren showed up in person and raised a huge stink, there wasn’t a lot they could do to stop us.

Besides, what were they going to do? Call the cops on us?

“Miri?” Black’s voice was a soft growl. “It sounded urgent. With Nick. Can you leave this or not? I don’t want you down here alone.”

I was already rising to my feet.

“I’m coming.” I brushed off the front of my pants and jacket. “It’ll be fine as long as none of his people come in here, realize what we’re doing, and stop the transfer… or worse, try to delete it from the Black Securities network. Hopefully, if anyone did come in here, they’d just unplug the external…”

I was basically just thinking aloud at that point.

“…That wouldn’t matter much, as it’s a redundancy. We should probably look around down here some more, in case we missed something. Or have Nick take a look––”

“We’ll do that after,” Black urged. “Come on. Let’s go up.”

He paused though, and glanced around the office.

A scowl briefly touched his lips.

“If they erase anything, we’ll start over,” he said coldly. “If we have to push every human who walks through that door, we’re going to finish this, then call the cops the second we’re out the door. I’ve had it with their evasive crap. We’re taking every scrap of information we can off these pricks. I really am beginning to think this whole thing is just some lame attempt by Gorren to frame me… but we’ll let the cops sort that out. I’m going to tell Angel to pass on to the S.F.P.D. that they should be giving a hard stare to Gorren as prime suspect number one.”

I couldn’t disagree with that.

I couldn’t disagree with any of it.

In fact, I was relieved to hear him say it out loud. I was pretty damned tired of Rania Gorren, Lucian Rucker, Prometharis, and all of their bullshit, too.