Broken
“Wait wait wait,” I say, stooping down low enough to look Ping in the eye. “Half a million dollars, or yen? Because if it’s yen, that’s only like twenty-four bucks.”
There’s that look again.
“Dollars,” she says in an unreasonably cold tone.
I frown at the phone in her hand. I mean sure, it’s glassy and you can stroke it gently in the night to keep you company after the hookers reject you because you’re suddenly too poor to afford them, but seriously… my phone is pretty snazzy too, and isn’t worth half a million of anything. I must be using it wrong.
“So what’s on it that’s so valuable?” I ask as we head back toward the taxi stands.
“Access to the Sitewide Dynamics intranet. Every single email, contract and chip schematic they’ve got.”
I’m not a technological person. I use my phone for its intended uses: making calls and that helicopter game. But still, even I know enough about security to know this isn’t making sense.
“How’s that possible? Isn’t that stuff locked up? Doesn’t he have a password on something like that?”
“Yes it is, and yes he does.”
“So how’d you break it that fast?”
“His wallpaper is a picture of his dog. Wearing a name tag that says ‘Ellie’. Guess what the password is?”
Oh my god, there’s someone in this world stupider than me!
“That’s amazing,” I gasp. “Let me see…”
I take the phone from her hands and move to unlock it, but… well, you have to remember I’ve been having a very bad day. The shit that was kicked out of me got up and kicked me too, so it’s not like I’m in peak physical form. Also, I’m never anywhere near peak physical form anyway. So it’s not totally unexpected that I have a hard time keeping hold of things as slippery as phones.
I’ll just say: crash.
Ping stops walking, turns around and stares at me. Then the floor. Then me again.
“You didn’t.”
This is an awkward moment.
“You didn’t!” she shrieks, and scoops the phone off the concrete. She massages it gently, careful around the cracked glass screen. I can see she wants a moment alone, so I start to back away.
“No you fucking don’t!” she snaps, grabbing my shirt and pulling me close. “You’re not going anywhere!”
I guess I’m not taking this seriously enough, given that I never really believed we were that close to half a million dollars in the first place. Ping, on the other hand, is about to descend into a kind of hysteria reserved for severely obese people who just found out all the McDonalds in their town have been replaced with organic salad bars.
She pushes the “on” button, then again, then again, and the tears start to fill her beady little eyes, and I feel bad for her, so in a selfless act of self-preservation, I touch her shoulder gently.
She bends my pinkie backwards in a very unfriendly way.
“You idiot,” she growls. “This was my ticket out of here!”
“I thought we were partners,” I gasp.
Her expression changes suddenly. Honestly, this is scarier than if she could maintain the same mental state across four consecutive minutes. She lets go of my finger, puts out her hand.
“Fine, partner. Give me your phone.”
“My ph—”
She smacks me over the head very viciously for someone so small. I didn’t even know she could reach that high.
“Phone. Now.”
I fish out my phone, hand it over. She shoves it and Elephant’s phone into her pockets, hails us a cab, and I can’t help but notice she’s refusing to make eye contact anymore. It’s like our roles are reversed or something. Freaky.
“Where to?” says the cab driver, some English bloke with a string of licorice hanging out of his mouth.
“Sitewide Dynamics downtown,” Ping says. “Know it?”
“Yes’m,” nods the cabbie.
“Take First Avenue,” she says. “Not the waterfront.”
“Ah, but there’s constr—”
“First!” she barks, and he shuts up. She looks at me, sees my mouth hanging open, scowls.
“What?”
“I’ve never seen pure evil so close.”
She ignores me, pulls out the phones, starts popping out parts. I can’t keep up with it all, but I choose to believe it’s because of recent head trauma, and her PhD in Nyah Nyah Nyah has nothing to do with it. When she’s done, she powers up my phone. Except it’s not my phone…
“What did…” I say, trying to read the screen.
“I swapped the cards,” she says, as if explaining to an especially stupid child. The kind that barfs his cereal into the bowl so he can have seconds. “Your phone is using his account now.”
“But the data… it’s all on that little thing you put in there?”
“No,” she grumbles. “That’s the problem. The data’s still on the broken one. If we’re lucky, I can trick Gafoday into buying this piece of shit instead of the real phone. Otherwise, we need to find someone who can get it out for us.”
“I bet the Ewok can do it.”
“The who?”
“Jackson. Big and furry and oh god I just gave myself a shiver.”
“Wait, is this the guy at your office?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Where Jimmy Scaz is waiting to kill you?”
“Only for another fifteen minutes or so.”
Ping looks out the window, distant, then sighs.
“Fine, we’ll try and fool Gafoday, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll risk going to the office. Sound like a plan?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never actually made one before.”
The cabbie giggles at this. When you think of all the potentially-serious business that cab drivers must overhear on a daily basis, it’s really quite amazing. If I intended to keep being a private eye after this is all over, I’d probably spend half my time questioning taxi company employees, and save myself a lot of effort.
In the middle of thinking that, I notice a card on the bulletproof partition between us and him. Another one of my damn business cards.
“Where the hell are these things coming from?” I say and pull it off. This one has more handwriting on it: “9iv”. What does that mean?
“Oh yeah,” snorts the cabbie. “Guy’s a detective. Take that card, I’ve got lots up here.”
I pocket it, then pause.
“Wait, what guy?”
“The detective,” the cabbie says, now joining the Gare’s a Retard Club.
“Himself? I mean, in person?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Said I should hand ‘em out, help drum up business, right?”
I look at Ping. Ping is not paying any attention to this. Not enough math involved, I guess.
“Where was he going when you saw him?” I ask.
“Bus depot in Cloverville,” the cabbie says. “I just got back from dropping him off when I snagged you two charmers.”
Now Ping is listening. I’ve got a twitch on the side of my face like a hamster in a cocaine-filled snowglobe.
“How… long… ago?” I ask.
“I dunno, ‘alf an hour ago?”
I check my watch. It suggests to me that either Matt is now an extremely well-behaved zombie, or he’s not actually dead. I can’t tell which option I’d prefer.
“What’s at the Cloverville bus depot that isn’t at the one downtown?” I ask.
“You mean besides the world-famous apple pies?” smiles the cabby like an especially inept used car salesman. “Not much. Just out of the way, I guess.”
Before I can really ponder this any further, the cab comes to a quick stop, and we’re back in the lobby of Ping’s old job. I wave broadly to the reception as we approach.
“Beelzebub!” I call. “Summon your master!”
She pushes a red button on the desk. Ping leans over, real close-like, and whispers something in her ear. The receptionist’s eyes shoot wide open, and she gets on the phone, nods, and then leads us into a back room without a word.
“You’re sure this will work?” I ask.
“Are you going to say anything?”
“No.”
“Then yes. It’ll work.”
The door opens and Mr Owl limps in, obviously still smarting from the eviscerating he endured earlier. I can’t help but notice he is standing a safe distance away from her, eyeing her hands cautiously.
“Jei,” he nods. “Nice to see you again.”
She holds up my phone for him to see.
“Oliphant’s phone,” she says bluntly. “It has access to their whole intranet. Everything. How they’re raiding our overseas suppliers, the contacts they have in the government, which of our executives are on their payroll… Remember those prototype designs we’ve been hearing about? Not rumours. And they’re all right here.”
“But if he’s lost this, they’ll—”
“Taken care of. You have about an hour before anyone finds out about this.”
He looks at the phone, then at Ping, then at me.
“How did you get this?”
“That’s not important.”
“Legally-speaking, I think it might be…” he says.
“Legally? If you use this information, they won’t have enough money to pay for a lawyer’s lunch, let alone a lawsuit.”
A long pause. I’m about as tense as a hillbilly at a spelling bee, but Ping looks like she’s got it all under control. Mr Owl inhales slowly.
“How much do you want?” he asks finally.
“A million.”
This is considerably more than we’d discussed, but I do my best not to let my elation show.
“Five hundred thousand,” he counters.
“Nine.”
“Five and a half.”
“Eight and a half, or we walk, and I get on the phone with the Department of Defence and let them know about the laptop you lost.”
He flinches. Ping stays stoic. I am doing a happy dance in my underwear in my head. All my happy dances involve underwear. Stop judging me.
“Fine,” Mr Owl grumbles, pulling out his phone. “Cash, I presume?”
“Transfer,” Ping says quickly. “To my account. You have it on file.”
Mr Owl frowns. I’m frowning on the inside.
“But—”
“Label the transfer ‘severance pay’,” she says.
A smile spreads across his face. He nods, repeats the instructions into the phone, then closes it carefully.
“It will be done within fifteen minutes,” he says.
“Good,” Ping says, and hands him the phone. He turns it on and greedily bumps into a password screen. His face blanches. He looks at Ping.
“What’s the—”
“You get the new password I set when I confirm the money’s in my account,” she says. “And don’t try cracking it. It’s very long, and very complicated.”
He scowls at her, but given her general willingness to savagely maim people (like, for instance, him), he probably doesn’t want to say anything overtly impolite. She pats him on his shoulder, leads me out the door.
“We’ll call when the funds show up!” she says. “Be ready!”
Outside, I stop her, pull her into an alley.
“If you were a real person, you’d be my hero,” I say. “How did you see all that secret stuff on the phone before it broke? You only used it for ten or twelve seconds!”
“I made it up. Told him what he wanted to hear.”
“No shit.”
“Nobody fires me and lives,” she sneers. I must remember to clarify with her her non-employment status with my firm. When she’s less testy.
“So I guess we just wait for the money, and send him the password…?” I suggest, trying to catch up.
“I can’t give him the password. I just hit keys randomly. I have no idea what I typed. No, we’ll fix the phone, download the info, and then blackmail Oliphant for another million. Sound good, partner?”
“Actually,” I say, dumping acid rain on the parade, “speaking of partners… how about we take a ride over to Cloverville to find Matt. Because — no offence to your plan — if I don’t prove he’s not dead, I’ll be a little too imprisoned to enjoy any ill-gotten gains you have planned.”
“I’ve got a better idea!” calls Turner, climbing out of his car, Brunch close behind. “How about we all take a ride down to the station, where I beat the shit out of you and say you walked into a door?”
“Heh,” snorts Brunch.
They may be inbred half-wits, but these two make damn good bloodhounds. Unfortunately.