Will and Zoey both glanced back at the gawkers. The crowd was being kept in check by large men in suits with black pants and bright yellow jackets. They weren’t Zoey’s people, they were from a popular security service called the Vanguard of Peace, its logo a glorious sunrise over the silhouette of a waving child. They’d been called in to help control the crowd and billed by the hour. They also were quick to get brutal with anything they arbitrarily deemed to be a “riot” (those yellow coats really showed the blood). The prospect of this turning into a night of car-flipping chaos was part of what was turning Zoey’s insides to jelly.
Will said, “Yeah, control the crowd. And the VOP.” Will noticed something over Zoey’s shoulder and said, “He’s here.”
A second vehicle pulled up, a panel truck with an animated ASHE DEVELOPMENT logo on the side, cartoon workers assembling the letters out of girders. The truck parked and the rear door lowered like a drawbridge, revealing its cargo to be a gleaming black metal object roughly the size and shape of a crouching rhinoceros. A butterfly-sized drone buzzed in front of Zoey’s face, bearing a tiny camera that was probably one of five hundred tiny cameras watching her at the moment. If you enjoyed livestreamed human tragedy, Tabula Ra$a was an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Zoey smacked the drone aside with her hand and said, “Can everybody hear me? Are you all in your spots?”
From a nearly invisible earpiece in her right ear, four voices spoke at once, rendering all of them an indecipherable jumble until one person finished their sentence with “hot link.”
Zoey said, “Let’s try that again, one at a time. Budd?”
A man with a Texas drawl said, “The hostage taker’s name is Dexter Tilley. Twenty years old. Frequent customer of the Night Inn. You’ve never met him. Inherited a house from his gramma, sold it a week ago, and used the cash on bootleg skeletal and musculature Raiden implants. Can’t find anybody who’ll admit selling him a brain zappin’ contraption but they do exist.”
Will said, “We’re obviously going to assume he has it.”
Budd said, “Echo’s with me.”
The voice of Michelle “Echo” Ling chimed in. “Every time Tilley came here, he requested the same girl, a nineteen-year-old named Shae LaVergne. She is currently in the room with him. So you’ve got over one hundred hostages but it’s looking like this is about her.”
Oh, god, Zoey thought. The guy fell in love with one of the professionals. She now feared the sheer awkwardness of this encounter more than death.
“Well, that all sounds terrible,” said Zoey. “Where are you now?”
“Budd and I are both inside. Trying to keep the inn’s staff calm.”
“You are? How did you get in?”
Zoey had been told they were waiting at the scene, but didn’t know they were, like, in the scene.
Budd said, “We were here before Tilley. Been tailing him all day.”
“You were tailing him, but arrived before he did?”
“You do your homework,” Budd said, “and you can tail from in front.”
“All right, way to earn your paycheck. Wu, you in position?”
Wu was Zoey’s personal bodyguard, who the hostage taker had specifically demanded not accompany Zoey to the meet. Again, they intended to push the envelope as far as possible on that demand.
A hushed voice in her ear said, “I am.”
“Where?”
“The fourth floor of the Hyatt, across the street.”
Zoey turned and looked behind her, the front of the hotel flashing an animation of a waterfall cascading and breaking over the main entrance. There was a world-class seafood joint on the top floor and there were animated fish swimming around up there. Occasionally one would go leaping out of the “water” and a shimmering silver tuna would break the boundary of the roof and soar into the actual night sky, a projected hologram picking up the animation as one smooth motion. The tourists loved stuff like that.
Wu said, “When you turn to look at me, anyone watching will immediately know why, that you are looking to your sniper.”
“Oh. Right. Andre?”
From her other ear, she heard, “I’m right next to you, getting a hot link.”
She turned and there he stood, a large black man with a shiny bald head, squirting mustard onto a sausage he’d just bought from the one-man band.
He said, “See, now you’re giving away my position. Already this thing is a train wreck. And did you see that Halloween Month ad that ran up there? Since when has this city had public nudity laws?”
Andre actually was in position. His job was to remotely pilot the shiny black thing in the back of the panel truck.
Zoey looked it over. “I thought you were supposed to get the scariest drone you could find? This just looks … fancy. It’s piano black. It looks like a sculpture some old rich guy would have in his parlor.”
“It’s scarier in motion. SWAT teams in Israel use ’em for hostage negotiation all the time. Well, they don’t really do all that much negotiating…”
“So the hostage taker can talk to this thing and I can talk back through it?”
Will said, “Even better, it’ll display a live hologram of your face to the front end there, that way he gets facial expressions, too. That’s important for building rapport. When I talk, it’ll switch to mine.”
It sounded like Will had used one of these before. Zoey would have to remind Will to never tell her that story.
There was a scuffle in the crowd behind them, some of the spectators getting roughly shoved back by the yellow jackets. The agitators were mostly guys in their twenties, and they were mooing at Zoey, like cows. Zoey was well known in the city, but not necessarily well liked, and at some point her detractors had decided she was a cow. They sold T-shirts and everything, depicting her head on a cow’s body, only drawn to mimic Zoey’s in cartoonish yet hurtfully accurate ways (they even included her missing tooth). The first time she’d seen one of the shirts, she’d been eating at a cafe with her mother and bodyguard. She had rolled her eyes and snickered and actually made it all the way back to the car before she burst into tears.
Zoey said, “Can we push those people farther away or something? And by ‘something’ I mean have Kowalski shoot them? In the crotch?”
Will looked surprised. “I’d bring them closer if I could. If the guy is near that opening, I want him to hear the chants.”
She thought about asking why, but ultimately decided against it. Will liked to hear himself explaining things a little too much, so she tried to ration it out.
From her earpiece, Budd said, “Get to a screen, looks like the hostage taker is about to make a statement.”
As Will went for his phone, Wu spoke from Zoey’s earpiece. “He has reentered the room. He has the girl with him. He just moved behind the window frame, trying to stay out of view.”
Will brought up Blink, a searchable network of just about every running wireless camera on Earth. The top trending stream was titled “Night Inn Hostage Crisis, BIG Death Toll Assured—ALERT: POSSIBLE COW SLAUGHTER!”
Dexter Tilley appeared on-screen. Well, sort of. He was using a digital “mask” to cover his face on the feed and it replaced his head with a fairly realistic animated skull. Unless the guy actually was a talking skeleton, which if so, Zoey thought it was weird that Budd and Echo left that out of their summary. When Tilley spoke, his voice had been filtered, too. It was a high-pitched, taunting tone, about what you’d expect from a skeleton possessed by some kind of evil spirit.