Shadowrun Fiction, Because, "Why not?" Options

[SL James]

Besides, I have little patience. These have been sitting on my HD long enough.

False Flag

The clock radio clicked and began to play the voice of a Spanish-language news correspondent reporting on the current meeting of the Sovereign Tribal Council. Gisele was sprawled flat across the bed, and blinked before staring above at the ceiling. She reached over and turned off the radio in mid-sentence as the Sioux representative was discussing the Tsimshian situation, and smiled. She was excited. They were going on a job after a month-long drought. Jumping out of bed, she walked over and began picking pills out of the assorted bottles on her dresser. Before she swallowed them, she let her mind wander for a bit as her eyes fell over an old holo of herself and another young girl in front of Lombard Street in San Francisco.

-----

"Goddammit, get off me!" The man with his knee on Gisele's neck had her pinned to the floor, but that didn't keep her from trying to fight him off. This was the second time in a month that she had been taken down, but this time the people who got the drop on her weren't going to be so kind as to drug her and leave her in a Seatac coffin motel.

"If you don't stop fighting, I'm going to break your fucking arm," the one on top of her said. Just for good measure, he grabbed her left wrists, and twisted it back as he brought her arm behind her back. With his elbow against hers, he could easily push it the opposite direction it was supposed to bend.

"Fine," she replied as she stopped fighting. It wasn't the first time she was arrested, but never like this. "Who the fuck are you, anyway?"

"That's none of your business, bitch. Just shut the hell up."

Once she was handcuffed and on her knees, someone shoved a hardened rubber bit into her mouth hard enough that she began tasting blood. After that, the rest of the mage hood went on — first, the thick hood, and then the ear protection to block out sound.

-----

"Gee," Roddy called out as he smacked Gisele on the thigh, "heads up." The Japanese hacker was staring out the window, waiting for the replacement while Gisele was reviewing the intel they had acquired. Hiding the windows in her field of vision, she looked over as he walked into the coffee shop.

Diego had just bailed on them after the Vegas job, letting them know through one of his contacts going by the name Aufheben that the Dominican had some other commitments to attend to. The rest of the crew assumed that it had to do either with the pirate-warlord conflict back home, or his extracurricular activities with Black Star, a collective of shadowrunners, mercenaries, and anarchists with similar skill sets who perform direct action jobs.

However, he didn't leave them completely high and dry. Diego left them a list of potential temps. The top of the list was an elf who was a pro at infiltration, and who was now their way. His name was Josh Ballard, and Gisele couldn't help but notice that he was the first nondescript elf she ever laid eyes on. Roddy and Leni — the crew's mage — had vouched for him after doing some background legwork on ShadowSea and their own networks of contacts. In spite of his bad luck upon first arriving in Seattle from Boston, Ballard had proved himself as a silent, invisible killer.

-----

Gisele was crouched against a wall with the hood and handcuffs still on her, only now she was attached to the wall. They had the decency to remove the headset and bit, which was something. Her cybercomm was being jammed, hacked, and God-knows-what-else, so she wasn't even sure how long she had been sitting against the wall because it was just safer to deactivate it.
Finally, just about the time she had gotten accustomed to the discomfort of being against the wall in the dark, a door opened and she heard footsteps as they walked in. She could hear at least two sets of footsteps as they walked in and grabbed her by the arms, lifting her up as the handcuffs detached from the wall. After walking down a hallway, a flight of stairs and then another hallway, she was dumped on a hard chair while they left the hood on.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Vasquez." It was a woman's voice. Her accent wasn't local. It was mainland UCAS. Midwest. Maybe Illinois or Iowa. No further north than the Quad Cities. Regardless, Gisele didn't reply. Her face scrunched up in a mix of confusion and disbelief behind the hood. As far as the world knew, Gisele Vasquez ceased to exist — if she even existed at all — in 2064 after the Crash wiped out her SIN and official records.

"You should take comfort in the fact that we found you most easily. The rest of your crew has been scattered to the wind. The culpability for accessory to treason falls on you and you alone." Nodding to herself, Gisele acknowledged just how bad this situation was. But even still, it was also so absurd that she couldn't help but smile. If this was about who she thought it was, she was now being accused of aiding a person she failed to kill.

-----

This was going to have to be discrete. The offices of Roth, Capelli & Adkins comprised the top five floors of the Bank of North America building in downtown, near the ACHE. Benjamin Roth was probably the most prominent financial power-broker in the Seattle Republican Party, having raised well over one million nuyen for the RNC in the last presidential campaign. If this was to go after him, they would already be fucked sideways. Instead, they only had to compromise one of his attorneys, who was basically running a 'plex-wide campaign out of his office with Roth's approval.

Security had been pretty lax beyond the gauntlet of MAD and cyberware scanners just to get into the building, and soon Ballard and Roddy had disappeared, making their own way up. That left Gisele and Leni with all the fun of walking through the firm's front doors.
Before they got on the second elevator to take them to the top of the tower, Gisele had excused herself to disappear into one of the public restrooms. Inside one of the stalls, Gisele sat on a toilet while chewing on a couple of heavy-duty painkillers. Some of the pain was real, lingering from the beating she suffered during her "detention." Some was from the beating she suffered in Vegas and the gel round to the chest before that. But mostly the drugs just made her feel good.
Stepping out of the stall, everything seemed to slow a bit as she settled into the high. There weren't many people in the marble lobby as she waited for the elevator. The building was pretty spectacular, even when compared to the opulence of the Wynne Las Vegas: a building with marble stall doors in the public restrooms. One of those people, however, was the Persian-German elf mage. She was still a corp brat at heart, but on the job her focus to the magical side often made her oblivious to certain facets of what was going on in the real world. In this case, she was unaware that her teammate was high.

When the elevator doors opened, Gisele was faced with the sight of what a major law firm really can buy. A young and attractive elf woman greeted the runners within six paces off the elevator and led her through the glass doors and into a two-story lobby. The whole time, her brain was trying to tell her that it was way out of their league, but she didn't listen.

-----

"You fucked up one of our operations in Las Vegas. Two years pissed away because of your actions," the woman said with disdain.

"How can I be an accessory to treason? I'm SINless."

"Shut the fuck up. You provided aid to a traitor. Not that the penalty is any less severe."

"Oh, what the Hell? I thought this black-bag, kill or disappear everyone who pissed you off shit went away when Colloton moved into the White House."

"Your aunt would have been ashamed of you. A criminal. A street mercenary no less."

"What the... Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Like you know anything."

"I know that Samantha Madison murdered her, and now you're doing her dirty work." Gisele clenched her teeth behind the mask. She wasn't sure if this was a lie, but either way the whole mess was beginning to piss her off. Her head began to ache along with the rest of her body. She needed her painkillers. The woman laughed as the whole experience began to disorient and confuse Gisele. "You were content to work for the woman who let your friend die, but this upsets you. Fascinating.

"We will make an arrangement if you cooperate. You get a new SIN; a new life — a life away from her. I'll even give you proof that what I say is true, and you can do what you like with that information." Gisele couldn't see through the hood as the woman gave a sinister-looking smile.

-----

"You were disposable." The woman said it without a shred of empathy. "It's the same reason I'm hiring you this time."

Gisele looked into her employer's crystal blue eyes and knew she was telling the truth. The black Armante suit. The quiet office lined on three sides by bookshelves. To Gisele, it felt like the last time she met with her attorney. However, the comparisons ended there.

Ms. Madison was a retired colonel who spent over twenty years in counter-intelligence for the Army and DIA before she was nearly killed during the New Revolution uprising. Afterwards, Samantha became a minor celebrity thanks to her testimony in Congressional and investigative commission hearings due to her admission that she was involved in illegal and quasi-legal operations, some of which co-opted official counter-terrorism operations. She never apologized for what she thought was the right thing, which in many people's eyes made her just as much of a traitor as Senator Braddock.

Both women were professional liars and manipulators, but frankly Gisele was outclassed by decades. This was a woman who not only survived Gisele's attempt to murder her, but convinced Gisele's crew to work for her. However, unlike the Vegas job, she handled the hiring herself instead of through an intermediary. Having just been dumped back into her apartment when the call came, Gisele couldn't help but think that something was askew.

"Fair enough," Gisele replied. "You must really trust us."

"No. I trust that I can have you disappear if you hint at my involvement." Damn. That's cold. She suddenly wished a painful death on this woman.

"So, you want us to... What, exactly?"

"Kidnap Francisco Hernandez."

"Come again?"

"He's running the campaign for Senator Royer's re-election basically out of his office."

"Okay," Gisele replied cautiously.

-----

After waiting five minutes, a well-dressed man stepped out from behind the door and past the receptionist towards Gisele and Leni. "Good morning, ladies. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. I'm William Connelly. You must be from the Spiros Foundation."

The women introduced themselves under their cover identities, and then followed the lawyer through the doors and into what seemed like another world. As he led them to one of the conference rooms, they passed by dozens of people who seemed transfixed in their own little worlds. When she told them what they were hitting, Roddy couldn't help but laugh. Lawyers, he said, love all sorts of new tech gizmos, but it drives their IT people nuts because all that tech makes security — namely, client confidentiality — a nightmare. And that doesn't even include whatever the clients or visitors themselves bring in. Gisele seemed to guess that the lawyers were the ones with datajacks, especially the older ones who probably had legacy jacks from before the second Matrix Revolution that they upgraded over the years.

Their destination was the third floor conference room, in the very heart of the firm. Roddy had used the intelligence they bought off a more-reputable info broker to build them identities as representatives of one of the firm's clients — a nonprofit which had provided millions to the University of Seattle for nanoscience research. It was risky, but their target's office was also on this floor, and they would in fact pass it. As they did, Gisele looked over at the office and saw Javier Hernandez sitting at his desk. She also saw Ellen Danquist sitting across from him, with two well-dressed men standing behind her.

["We have a problem"] she announced over their network.

-----

"It's a pleasure to meet you," The lawyerly icon stood tall in the representation of a bespoke navy suit with pinstripes made of tiny red dots. "I had to meet you after I got word of your search. This job involves things with which you shouldn't yourself."

"I just need the intel, Kay, not commentary." Gisele's icon stared blankly ahead, seemingly through Kay St. Irregular's icon.

"I think you do, actually. You're asking for the kind of information for an extraction which will provoke the wrath of God to come down on you. Your reputation is already teetering on the abyss of irrelevancy after what happened with Colonel Madison."

"I — We — took a shot. I guess it was a combination of factors, but I felt that we didn't have a choice at the time. I stand by it."

"And so... Here you are."

"Will you help me, or should I take my business elsewhere?"

"Yes. As it so happens, while everyone is focused on the gubernatorial race and the dispute between Danquist and Kenneth Brackhaven, most people seem to ignore the fact that she's also become involved in a disagreement with Senator Royer. He and Brackhaven are sort of competing to be at the top of the ticket, but in doing so Royer has shifted his fundraising towards the archconservative faction of the party thanks to his new campaign director. This doesn't make a lot of sense given that his director works for one of Angela Colloton's biggest supporters, but some people have taken it as a sign that the old man is hedging his bets in the event that Brackhaven manages a Republican sweep. Meanwhile, Ellen Danquist is trying to kneecap him by going straight to the RSCC. It's complicated, but she can and he can't deal with the national party directly. They get to leave Royer and Hernandez out of the loop."

"So, basically the same thing that's happening with the governor's race?"

"Not exactly. There are angles to that which are only going to get uglier as the race proceeds. For one, there isn't anyone in the party with enough support to replace Royer on the ballot through intra-party machination. However, that is another matter. But mostly, the RNC can do whatever it wants, including subverting any attempts to curry favor with the archconseratives."

"So what about Hernandez? I can't seem to find much about him."

"He's something. His family back in Spain are very much arch-conservatives and supporters of the militarist party in Spain. He's a good fit with Brackhaven and with whatever Royer's up to. He turned out to be a rainmaker for the firm and for the Senator's campaign, so he gets a lot of breathing room."

"This doesn't make any sense."

"Danquist is a canny manipulator. That's how she became and has remained mayor of Auburn. She oversaw a hell of a grassroots machine, focused on microtar— on getting the vote out by using peoples' friends to sell her to the undecided and independents. The party loves her. The President admires her efforts, but hey, shit happens sometimes, and she lost the primary. That doesn't mean that she isn't still trying to ensure that when the Republicans sweep Seattle, they are under her control."

-----

The lawyer led Gisele and Leni into the conference room, and showed them to their seats.

"I'm sorry, William, but could you excuse us for a moment?"

"Sure." He walked out of the room, and let the glass go opaque as the door closed behind him.

["So, what's the deal?"] Josh asked. The men said, speaking from a loosened panel above the conference room above them.

"There's no problem," Josh said as he looked around the room, minimizing his profile with relation to the furniture in the room, in the event that the liquid crystal was translucent and not opaque.

"Yeah. There is. He's meeting with a Republican party bigwig." Gisele began to pace around the table slowly, more for emphasis than out of concern.

"And?" Josh blurted out. "We're already in the middle of crowded office on the one-hundred twenty... third floor. They aren't going to matter when we drop in on them."

"He's right, Gee." Roddy looked her in the eyes and nodded. "I mean, okay, the woman is a mayor, but the other two are just staffers from the Republican National Committee. It's no thre—
"Shit." Everyone turned to look at Roddy as he was suddenly consumed with his heads-up display imagery. He sent the other three a live uplink. Gisele opened the link in her cybercomm, and a group of small windows quickly cascaded on the left side of her field of vision. On top was a live video image of four men in suits walking through the hallway towards the firm's lobby with purpose. "They're Feds."

"Move," Gisele ordered. Josh and Roddy pulled back from the panel, sliding it back into place. After it was closed, Gisele opened the door and let the room become visible to the outside world, and she called in William as well as the rest of the group of lawyers assembled outside. The Martel Foundation was not an insignificant client. But the rest of the windows in her field of view showed that several of them were headed downstairs. "We're done in here."

Turning to look at her teammate, she was now certain that they had betrayed her. It made sense in a way, but it also showed their hand. In the hallway, the others continued to stand around while William walked into the room. Closing the door, the glass walls frosted into a massive silvery sheet.

["Abort."] Gisele spun around in her chair, and closed her eyes as the video played and the agents approached Hernandez's office. "I'm sorry. Something's come up."
William looked across the table at her with a dour look on his face. "Indeed. It has." Gisele could barely hear the click coming from the doors as the magnetic locks engaged.

-----

"Do your job. And do it ASAP." Samantha took on a commanding tone the likes of which Gisele had never encountered, and the sudden impulse to kidnap Hernandez was overwhelming.

"He works for..." She paused, instinctively opening up a search window before she realized the connection was blocked. Looking down, she saw a business card. "Wait. Isn't this firm..." Samantha said nothing, but the look on her face as they sat eye to eye was enough to convince Gisele to stop talking immediately.

"It's half the price of Vegas. Minimal risk." Never trust a Johnson. That was the rule, and rules exist for a good reason. The colonel was probably the most notorious government Johnson in the last decade, at least, and Gisele had the scars to prove that 'minimal' was quite relative.

"I'll have to check with the others." Stall. Don't do anything without finding out more. This woman doesn't practice the art of the straightforward deal. All manner of intuitive and learned lessons of the deal entered her train of thought; anything not to agree to this. It seemed bad at the beginning, but now she knew it was.

"You're already in. You accepted the moment you took that card."

"That's not how we work."

"Fine. But let's look at this rationally. Your reputation in the shadows has bottomed-out, and you nearly had a Johnson poached in the middle of a meet. Have you even had any offers since then? The others will follow you because they trust you."

Maybe she did kill Sonia, she thought, but she does have a point.

-----

"What are you doing here?" Connelly spat out. Suddenly, the feeds went dead. The comm's signal was dead, which seemed a pretty obvious security tactic under the circumstances: Isolate and alienate. Leni probably didn't notice, though. Gisele was grateful for that because it meant that she was focused on the lawyer's sudden change. He froze up, and then collapsed. By the time he hit the floor, both women had leapt to their feet and were walking towards to the spot beneath where Roddy and Josh had appeared.

"I'm glad I wore pants," Leni said as she grabbed one of the chairs and stood on top of it. Gisele muttered something under her breath, but the elf was too busy getting them out to notice. One the ceiling panel was removed, she reached up into it as a hand reached down and grabbed her wrist. Once Leni was in the crawl space, Gisele followed.

Inside the crawl space, Josh took the lead. He was fast for someone crawling on all fours, and Gisele especially had trouble keeping up. However, he was the stealth expert, so they had to follow him and hope that no one caught them as they made their way through the space to an elevator shaft. It was dark and cold, and also noisy as the sounds of the entire tower echoed around them. Looking down, Gisele couldn't help but notice that there didn't seem to be a bottom. It was one of the express elevators that went directly up to the law firm from the garage, which meant a nearly 400 meter vertical drop.

"Going up," Roddy said as he dropped a pair of harnesses down to the women. Looking up, she could already see them climbing up to the elevator housing on the roof. It was a simple four-point harness, but it was only a precaution in the event of a fall from the greasy ladder rungs. Still, she couldn't help thinking about the drop.

-----

Gisele sat on her bed, head still pounding and body aching, the pill bottles were lying next to her. Relief would come, but not soon enough for her. It was the idea — the very suggestion, even — that Madison had killed her aunt that convinced Gisele to play these people's game. Sonia Vasquez never discussed what she did, but Gisele always knew she was involved in some sort of clandestine government work. She disappeared in the summer of '64, and it wasn't until a year later that her family knew for sure Sonia was dead. No one would, or could, explain the circumstances, and the now-SINless girl had other things to worry about by then.

As the drugs kicked in, Gisele relaxed and let her mind wander. Life in the shadows had ceased to be worthwhile, and the shadows were growing ever less interested in her worth. Madison had a point about their rep, especially Gisele's. Two catastrophic failures to complete the same wetwork job did them in. Having to fend off a Johnson poacher was bad enough. Both occurring publicly in a runner bar was a cherry on top of the sundae of suck. They could use Madison, or her money anyway. But there was some principle pulling at her to deal with the midwestern woman.

When her commlink rang, she suddenly felt that the decision had been made for her. She answered, and heard the midwestern woman on the other end.

"We're supposed to kidnap Javier Hernandez from his office in two days. So, you send someone to stop it, and then I flip and give Madison up in exchange for, you know."

"Inside the firm? That's rather bold."

"Well, I figure it will be especially embarrassing to her that she sent runners inside the same firm that represented her."

"Yes. Yes, it will be. Thank you."

The line went dead, and Gisele heaved a great sigh. The photo of Gisele and her friend seemed to be staring back at her as she looked at her dresser, and she suddenly felt any doubt vanish as hate crept in and began to gnaw at her in her drugged state.

-----

Standing on the roof of the tower, Gisele finally got an appreciation of how windy the city could be. Then again, at 400 meters above ground level, just about everywhere is windy. Roddy and Josh made their way towards one of the ledges where a large machine the size of two refrigerators sat at an angle. It was a crazy escape route, but that's also what made it so appealing. Riding down the window-washing machine would be fast and direct down to ground level while the mage provided visual concealment.

The problem was that it wasn't going to carry them all in one pass, which meant two of them would be standing on the roof waiting for it to return, and hopefully before security arrived. Gisele made the decision to stay behind. She got them into this mess, after all, and if those agents were with the people who grabbed her then she would have a chance to make it out alive.

"I'll stay," Josh said as Roddy was finishing his hack on the machine's operational instructions.

"No. Go with them." Gisele wasn't much for debate during a job, especially with a replacement.

"Have you ever killed a God-chipped merc?" he asked. "I didn't think so," he added before she could answer. "I'm staying behind."

"Fine. Leni. Rod. Go."

The mage and hacker were barely harnessed in when it began to descend over the edge of the building. Once they were out of view, Gisele turned around and gazed across the helipad on the center of the roof. When she looked over to Josh, he had already disappeared, inexplicably managing to find concealment.

-----

"What do you know about Madison and her relation to civilian intelligence?" This time Gisele was on Kay's turf, deep within the Puzzle Palace — the DeeCee sprawl's equivalent to ShadowSea. It was a maze of white doors in a maze of featureless white halls. It was bureaucratic Hell hiding goodies behind anonymity.

But there was an area deep within, much like Olympus, that was designed to look like a marble palace to something left unsaid. Her footsteps had echoed through the chamber filled with translucent "ghosts" holding court in side halls and alcoves as Gisele's icon walked through until she had found Kay St. Irregular in an alcove that turned into a patio with the Capitol in the background.

"That's pretty vague. She was involved with a lot of things." Kay St. Irregular seemed in her element. A somber icon in a somber virtual environment.

"I've come across some information, but the source is... shady, to say the least. Did she ever murder anyone?" Someone from an intelligence agency, like the CIA?" Kay's icon remained motionless, waiting for more. "Did she murder Sonia Vasquez."

"Sonia Vasquez was killed after a failed assassination attempt on Antonio Popé in '64. They were close friends. Adepts in the intelligence community tend to stick together, regardless of agency. There just aren't that many working for the UCAS itself.

"I don't know. Someone had to tip off his bodyguards, or else after twenty years she suddenly got so sloppy it killed her. The colonel always talked about making sacrifices against the NR, and one spy would have been worth a high-value target like one of the Popé boys. Why does it matter, anyway?"

"Just principle, I guess. It seems like every time I turn around, it seems she was trying to destroy the country and not save it. Someone slipped and told me about her. If it's true, then wow, that's unconscionable."

-----

Time seemed to stand still as Gisele waited on the roof. She had found cover near one of the air conditioning housings, and just waited. Suddenly she could hear the sound of rotors beating, and looked behind her in time to see a small black helicopter bank towards the tower's helipad.
She looked back, trying to raise Josh on his comm and only finding horrific static and interference. She couldn't raise him or even keep the connection alive, and the others were already halfway down the building and incommunicado. "Ballard?" she finally called out loud.

"I'm right behind you," he whispered into her ear as the helicopter approached even more closely. She began to turn before she bumped into the muzzle of a suppressor with the base of her skull. She leaned forward so that only her hair made contact as it whipped around the suppressed pistol. "Sometimes, in politics, you have to put a gun to someone's head just to get their attention. Sometimes, it's exposing a major election law violation to the FBI when they would otherwise never be allowed to legally enter this building."

"And me?" Gisele winced. This was either when she got shot in the head, or the cavalry rescued her.

"Josh?" Repeating his name again, she finally turned to find that he had disappeared, and she was facing a half-dozen armed security guards.

"You're not the cavalry, are you?"