Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

been hours since she’d noticed the bad, sooty taste in mouth.

“Bring on those spiralized carbs,” she said as he signaled his turn. “We’re eating healthy!”

It was 12:10 p.m.

Tai sat watching from his Civic as the Mori girl and her friend left the fast food restaurant. He was in the parking lot of a small strip mall directly across Route 15, facing them through the polarized glass of his windshield. They had spent about a half hour at the place.

They started back to their vehicle. The wind had been stirring up for the past hour, and it whipped the girl’s hair around her head. Tai noticed people noticing her out there. Men and women, but the men in a different way. They looked at her from behind store windows. They looked at her from inside their cars. They looked at her as she walked past them, their eyes following her every step. Chalk-white skin, blowing white hair, lean and straight and long legged. Light on her feet like a ballerina.

A right different sort.

“Yeah, true that,” Tai whispered to himself.

He realized all at once that he was famished. How long had it been since he’d eaten? He had driven from New York on an empty stomach, 250 miles. And he had another hundred-odd miles to go according to the map on his in-dash display.

He glanced down at it for a moment, thinking. An exact image of the map screen on the Pilot’s dashboard, it gave him the Pilot’s endpoint destination—Chacagua Island, Maine—along with the route its passengers were taking there and any planned stops along the way. Of which the fast food joint had been the only one they had stored in its navigator.

His hack had been a cinch. All car rental outfits monitored their vehicles with real-time fleet telematics, and Tai had already gained entry to Get Up and Go New York’s servers, making it easy to access the Pilot’s head unit. Meanwhile, its driver had obligingly been using the unit as a display and controller interface for his smartphone, giving Tai access to a mother lode of information about him—his name not the least of it.

He thought of his twin brother and that buggers school tune he fancied. No surprise to hear it on his livestream while he’d done his wetwork. How did it go? “‘Back bone connected to neck bone, neck bone connected to the head bone...’”

Something like that. And wasn’t it the same with these digital connections? The driver’s phone connected to the Pilot’s head unit, the Pilot’s head unit to his Civic’s head unit, and Tai’s neurotech onboard computer to both while relaying the map-nav data to his brother’s onboard, brain to brain.

Tai waited now as the Pilot pulled out onto the road, turning back onto Route 15 for the northbound interstate. He did not need to stick close to its tail. He knew where its passengers were going. He could track them through any detours they might make and find them wherever they went.

He could therefore afford to spare a minute for himself. And he was damned hungry, as his growling stomach kept reminding him. A bit of takeout would remedy that nicely.

Tai stayed put until the Pilot swung onto the highway entrance ramp, then drove across the road and took the spot it had vacated. As he exited his car, a strong gust almost tore the door out of his hand, the sun simultaneously dimming overhead. Glancing up, he saw a raft of gray flat-bottomed clouds scudding across it from the south.

He stood still a moment, studying the sky, his eyes narrowed against the dull, filtered sunlight. Then he stepped toward the restaurant for his food, thinking he would be wise to avoid wasting too much time.

“Well, what did you think?” Bryan asked.

“I’m Bustered for life,” Natasha said.

“You really liked it? That much?”

“More,” she said. “We should stop back on the way home.”

He drove on amid the light traffic on I-95, looking pleased with himself. They were nearing an old-fashioned arch bridge with green steel trusses and beams.

“You know the CloudCable deal?” Bryan asked. “Between the government and Olympia?”

“Sure,” she said. “Professor Michaels has been all over it on his Net Talk podcasts. And I don’t blame him. It is not smart for government intelligence agencies to share a transcontinental cloud data pipeline with the biggest online retailer on the planet.”

Bryan nodded to the left as they rolled onto the bridge. “That’s Portsmouth Harbor. Where CloudCable’s based. The Stalwart—the cable-laying ship—sailed from there a couple of months ago.”

Natasha sat back, staring down at the water below. It was pretty rough, its swells slapping at the hulls of the boats scattered across its surface.

“Bry, have you by any chance seen a recent forecast?”

He nodded yes. “There’s that storm moving up the coast. Otherwise it’s pretty decent.”

She looked at him, remembering the blustery wind and clouds back in Massachusetts.

“Huh?” she said. “What storm?”

“The storm they said would blow out to sea around New Jersey.” A shrug. “Guess it hasn’t. Altogether, anyway.”

“But you told me the weather’s supposed to be great.”

“It is,” he said. “Except for a slight chance it won’t be.”

She exhaled. “We’re going to a deserted island. By freaking kayak. How do you not mention it?”

“I figured you knew,” he said. “I mean, you predict things.”

“That’s my job. Not my whole life. I’ve had a lot going on lately, you know?”

Bryan didn’t say anything. Natasha thought he looked hurt.

“Listen,” she said after a moment. “Where I grew up in Russia, storms were major fuckups.”

He drove on in silence a full two minutes. “If you want to call off our trip, we can still tur—”

“Welcome to Maine!” the navigator’s canned voice announced. They were about two-thirds of the way across the bridge.

Bryan looked sheepishly over at Natasha.

“We’re in Maine,” he said.

“No shit,” she said.

His face was thoughtful as they came off the bridge onto the turnpike. The overhead road sign up ahead read: 95 North to Portland, Lewiston, Augusta, Calico Bay Area.

Natasha turned to him.