To see is human, to comprehend divine
EP sat back down in her chair and took a long deep breath with her eyes closed before scanning the screens again. It felt like the first time she had been out of her chair in days, but it had really only been about an hour. She cracked open an import Monster and watched the cops try and salvage some scrap of peace from the wreckage of the fight.
A second police helicopter was in the air, their infrared and standard cameras now supplementing her feed. She was careful not to let her drones fly into frame. After she had played target practice with the remaining gunman for a few minutes, swooping down with expendable micro drones, flashing their high powered lights, and then going into avoidance maneuvers, SWAT had moved in. When one of her drone’s tagged the BearCat armored vehicle rolling toward the bridge, she dismissed her fleet, leaving only a few solar drones parked on rooftops for surveillance, while the rest flew off toward one of her recharge points or wiped into the river.
The gunman opened fire on the BearCat, but quickly realized it was pointless and scattered in opposite directions. One grabbed a dirt bike off the street while the other two got into cars left idling by fleeing civilians. Within five seconds, one of the cars was crushed half into scrap, and the other was riddled with so much 5.56 that it looked like it had been hiding sparklers under its paint. Motorbike guy was tracked by one of the choppers and zipped down the road right into a police roadblock. He skidded to a stop, raised a pistol, and collapsed in a rain of bullets.
Now she watched the cops move in to secure the area while ambulances waited flashing on the side lines. Her adrenaline was fading, and she felt like sleeping for a long time, Monster be damned.
She had sent out phishing texts disguised as law enforcement and media agencies promising cash rewards for footage of the shootouts, and her worms were already working their way through hundreds of phones and deleting any recently captured pictures or videos from the scene. All the security cameras had been wiped, and she was monitoring the social media feeds for anything that might have slipped through. Hopefully, it was a needless precaution. Soon Michael would know where the coin was and it would be just a matter of getting one of her drones out to get it.
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The cops had been all over Cooper’s POE and apartment the instant the warrants had gone through. She wondered where he could have put it, but didn’t have the energy to give it much thought. Best leave that to Michael. As the ambulances started streaming in across the bridges and cops shut off the traffic from the Bazaar, just under five minutes behind the team’s departure, an alarm chime sounded in her ears. One of her scanning programs had picked up something in the buzz.
It was a phone call, placed from inside the police line, located via an ultrasonic tone emitted by one of her landed drones. She pulled up the call and muted everything else.
“Fucking amateurs. While we sit with our thumbs up our ass.”
“Shut the fuck up about it. Can you get out?”
“Nah, they got it all blocked off. It’ll be a while. What’s next?”
“Not a damn thing over the phone. Just keep an eye out. They’re making moves.”
“So where am I going?”
“They’ll find you.” The caller clicked off the line.
“What the fuck—” and the call ended. EP snagged the phone numbers and sent programs to compile the usual data into new files. A second later she was watching the caller inside the police line from a camera drone at the back of the admin building. He got out of a dark sedan parked in the lot and waved to a cruiser driving down the back road. Buzz cut, Carhart jacket, black boot stamping out a cigarette.
The License plate number got sent along with the other data, and sure enough the files confirmed he was one of the cops from the strip mall shootout, now on admin leave. Standard procedure as he had fired his weapon. It didn’t take any software to know the other caller was probably the other cop who had fired a gun and lived to tell about it. She tagged them as Hardworlders in their files and tried to see if she could get eyes on the other one.
She glanced over at the micro drone feed watching the shootout scene from across the river. Red and blue lights poured across the bridge now that SWAT had it secured, reminding her of the cops rushing down to their doom minutes earlier.
The memory flicked a switch, of other vehicles rushing over the bridge minutes before. The way the gunmen had rushed in at the end. Desperate. Unprepared. Like they had been ordered. The way the entire shootout had felt like twenty crash dummies under three officers. The PKM, right where it needed to be.
It all felt like expendables deployed by higher forces. It felt like pawn sacrifice.
Something told her this job wasn’t as tied up as she had hoped.