Identity Theft, Chapter 19

19.
Forgive Me, Gina

Jack had only managed to get three hours of sleep the night before the breakout. When the sun finally rose on her and Kyra, a surreal veil was beginning to drape itself over her perception of the world. Fortunately, her plan was working without a hitch. She felt like she could probably sleepwalk her way through it. In fact, she probably did at times.

Too little sleep could impair even her phenomenal memory. Later, she would recall much of the rest of that night and the next day in little fragments, moments that stuck out from the parts of the journey that had played out exactly the way she had visualized.

Explaining to Kyra, in whispers, that the bus driver had strict instructions not to let any passengers without staff or guest passes board at the stop by the hospital…

…Kyra suggesting, on the bus, that they should go a few stops beyond the train station and double back, so that the driver wouldn’t know they had taken the train…

…Kyra, fully uncaged at last, climbing two trees and a scaffold so that she could drape a leafy branch over the security camera monitoring the station…

…finding someone’s lost baseball cap, for a team called the Helion Hellcats, on the way out of the train station and putting it on, while Kyra teased her that she’d probably get head lice from it…

…walking through one of the seediest, roughest neighborhoods they could find, their money cards hidden deep in their smalls, a wallet with the two hospital guest passes bulging conspicuously in her back pocket, and feeling the moment when someone brushed past her and the wallet was gone, exactly as she had intended. A second later, a yelp and a voice swearing, “that bitch cut me!” while Kyra smiled serenely…

…crumpling up the papers from the hospital files and feeding them, a few at a time, to a trash can fire that had burned low before they got there, while Kyra read over the notes in her file before adding them to the flames…

…calling out to two working girls on their way home, as the sky lightened, asking if they wanted to make more money in five minutes than they’d made all week by swapping clothes…

…how jarring Kyra looked with a short, blonde bob, after one of the working girls also sold them her wig…

…taking another train ride, their trail hopefully broken, to the spaceport, while Kyra tried not to shrink away from the stares their outfits were drawing…

…yet another costume change after hitting one of the 24-hour stores situated around the spaceport, now into the same kinds of coveralls that Jack had observed a dozen workers wearing on their commute into the station…

…passing a group of kids right around their age, dancing and freestyling for coins from passing travelers and feeling a wistful longing to stop and get to know them better…

…finding a data kiosk that she could log into, turned away from most of the cameras…

That was when Jack came fully awake again, her focus snapping back into place. It was almost ten in the morning.

By now, she figured, the pandemonium her Scorched Earth plan had created would have been mostly brought under control. It would have receded slowly, simulating various system failures for several hours before allowing the systems to be restored more than an hour after shift change would normally have occurred. By the time the day crew could even get into the building, any patients who had slept through the chaos would be awake and expecting breakfast… and their morning meds. None of which would have been prepared during the crisis.

If they were lucky, the purely human bedlam that would have resulted from that would only now be coming under control. And if they were really lucky, nobody would have bothered to check in on how two heavily sedated patients, who were expected to sleep past noon, were faring while there were so many more immediate concerns.

It would be especially ideal if nobody realized anything was amiss in their room until it was time for the custody transfer. But Jack was a realist. More likely — and especially given her personal history of hiding in unexpected places to avoid group therapy sessions — the ward was being searched, top to bottom, and within the next hour the search might begin to spread outward.

Sitting at the data kiosk, Jack felt herself relaxing just a little as familiar menus appeared. Apparently the government of Helion Prime had contracted for a lot of the products her father’s old firm had designed. The hospital, law enforcement, and now the spaceport…

A moment later, she had logged into the law enforcement back door and was configuring their next moves.

“Who taught you how to do this?” Kyra whispered, watching the screen intently.

Jack liked Kyra. She trusted her. But, she realized, not quite enough to actually tell her the truth. “I ran with a guy, Paris, for a while. He was a smuggler.”

Every word she’d just said was, technically, true. It just wasn’t actually the answer to Kyra’s question.

Kyra, however, seemed content with the answer, nodding and going back to watching as Jack pulled up maps and schematics, memorizing them and setting up subroutines for the security system to run when she put in her ghost codes. She wouldn’t do anything dramatic, not here. Drama would ground all the flights, and they were trying to get offworld. Instead, things would be subtle, insidious, minor glitches that rectified themselves mere minutes later. Much like her original escape plan for the hospital before she realized nothing short of total chaos would give them enough of a head start.

Finally she felt ready. She’d picked their ship, cleared the path, and even arranged for a few things they would need. When a courier approached them ten minutes later and asked her to sign for a package, she inwardly sighed with relief. Now they had everything.

“One day,” Kyra said, attaching the ID tag that identified her as J. Houlot, electrician, to her coveralls. “You get a staff account for one day, and this is what you do. And I thought Stacy was scary…”

Kyra grinned at her to soften the words, the admiration in her eyes reassuring Jack that, in this case, “scary” was a compliment.

“Says the girl who climbed thirty feet in the air to disable a camera,” Jack teased back. That was something she’d never have had the guts to do, herself. Her tag identified her as P. Finch, systems tech. With AI systems completely outlawed on Helion, computer technicians were fairly commonplace. No one would question them.

And, given how haggard she and Kyra were beginning to look after being up all night, no one was likely to think they looked too young for the job. She hoped.

“So what’s the plan?” Kyra asked, keeping her voice soft. The spaceport was noisy, and the acoustics in the main departure terminal were terrible, but they were still taking no chances.

“There’s a ship scheduled to depart this evening, the Scarlet Matador, that will take us to Tangiers Six.”

“Why Tangiers Six?”

“Its spaceport is five times the size of this one,” Jack explained. “We get there and we can go anywhere.”

“Won’t that make it obvious that we’d try to go there?” Kyra asked, her expression keen.

“Normally, but I left clues in my file to suggest I’m from the Bayou Nebula and might try to go back there, but that’s in the opposite direction, and the ship going there leaves an hour and a half after the Matador. Hopefully that’s the one people will be watching.”

Kyra chuckled. “You really plan ahead. So why the maintenance worker costumes?”

“We’re going to board the Matador through the service corridors an hour before passengers are scheduled to start boarding,” Jack explained. “That’ll be at 4:30 pm. I saved spaces for us. Officially three cryo tubes are malfunctioning and we can even say we were dispatched to look at them, if anyone asks. So any last-minute passengers won’t be able to reserve them. They’ll be ours.”

“I don’t know. I hate the thought of being in cryo if anybody catches up with us.” A worried frown creased the older girl’s forehead.

“Me too. You don’t even know.” The hour she’d spent trapped in her tube, during and after the Hunter-Gratzner crash, might have counted as one of the most terrifying of her life, if that whole damned planet hadn’t decided to engage in a progressive game of one-upsmanship. “I’m going to set our tubes to wake us up the moment anything goes even a little weird, and — if everything goes normally — two hours before the crew is scheduled to wake up. We’ll be ghosts.”

Kyra’s uncertain look faded, and she nodded. “I guess that’s as good as we can get, right? So now what?”

“Food. I planned on bringing some of the dinner rolls from last night with us, but I forgot the damn things. I really need something to eat.”

The two girls grinned at each other and went in search of a long-overdue breakfast.

Small as the spaceport might be compared to other worlds, the place was still enormous. They stopped in a few shops after eating, buying bags that passed for the kinds of gear bags technicians would carry, filling them with basic necessities: toiletries, a change of clothes, items of that nature. Jack found herself an auburn wig, in a small boutique, and swapped out her “Helion Hellcats” cap for it, adding to her disguise. Then they began to wind their way through the crowds toward their destination. Helion was a peaceful and prosperous world, untroubled by political strife and terrorism, and its spaceport reflected that; non-passengers, meeting or seeing off friends and family, could walk almost all the way up to the gates before any security screening commenced.

Which, Jack realized as her heart lurched, meant so could mercenaries on the hunt. Her arm flashed across Kyra’s midriff, stopping the girl in her tracks.

Two familiar figures were studying the departure lists ahead of them, right where the hallways divided.

“So, which do ya reckon they’ll try to take?” Toombs asked in a raspy drawl. “The Bon Temps or the Scarlet Matador?”

Eve Logan, standing next to him, shook her head in annoyance. “How the hell should I know? My mark isn’t exactly a worldly type.”

“So let’s dope it out. Which one do you think he’ll want to take?”

Kyra pulled at Jack’s arm, drawing her over to some empty seats near the mercs. They sat down, backs turned to Toombs and Logan, listening carefully.

“You really think he’s with them?” Logan asked.

“Are you kidding? Who else coulda planned that escape?” Toombs demanded. “This has Riddick written all over it. Bastard walked right in and snatched them from under our noses.”

“Doesn’t seem like his usual M.O. to me,” Logan objected.

“Oh really? And why’s that?”

“Nobody’s dead.”

Toombs’s only response was an annoyed grumble.

“So why the Bon Temps?” Logan asked after a moment.

Unlike Toombs, who had pronounced “Temps” as if he were talking about short-term workers, Logan pronounced it the French way, almost rhyming it with “Bon.” That earned another grumble from her companion.

“The Jane Doe’s from there,” Toombs told her. “He probably thought he was hot shit, scrambling their files and stealing the hard copies, but he didn’t get her browser records from yesterday, when you were hangin’ out in the library. Girl was all up in her favorite shows, The Cookin’ Cajun and Bayou Dreamers, fergodsake. You had to hear ’em.”

“I heard some. She wasn’t anything to me back then except my mark’s roomie.”

“So you gotta know she’s from the Bayou Nebula.”

“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind.”

“Sounds like I have.”

“Tell you what,” Logan said after a moment. “Your reasoning is sound, but just in case, how ’bout I stake out the Matador while you’re staking out the Bon Temps?”

“Don’t you be thinkin’ of cashin’ in on all three of ’em without me. You need me. Riddick eats little girls like you for breakfast.”

“Is that what he’s doing with them?”

Toombs let out a raucous laugh. “You got a sick turn of mind. I like it. Okay. Fine. I take the Bon Temps…”

This time, he deliberately pronounced it correctly, his tone mocking.

“…and you take the Matador, and if either one of us sees somethin’ we call the other.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Jack risked a peek behind her. Toombs and Logan had parted ways and were walking toward their respective departure gates. As Jack watched, Logan sat down on a bench that gave her a prime view of all of the foot traffic that would approach the Matador’s gate. Fifteen feet behind her, the security screening station was open and processing early arrivals. Another ten feet past her, on her right, was the service entry that Jack had planned to use.

There was no way to reach it without walking right in front of Eve Logan.

“We can’t go in through another corridor?” Kyra asked, when Jack told her the problem.

“Each maintenance corridor is for one gate only. They don’t connect up.”

“Why?” Kyra asked in exasperation.

“Probably in case quarantine has to be called.” Jack’s mind was racing. They needed to get past Logan without her seeing. They needed her attention focused elsewhere. And they couldn’t do anything dramatic—

Oh.

Oh hell yes I can.

The plan bloomed in her mind and she almost laughed out loud. She glanced at the nearby chrono. They had time. She could make it happen.

“Come on,” she told Kyra, shouldering her bag and retracing their steps.

Aside from one collision with a distracted-looking man — “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there!” — nothing slowed them down. Kyra didn’t even notice until they were almost back at the spaceport entrance that Jack now had a fancy-looking comm unit and a snakeskin wallet.

“Where did you get—? You know what? Never mind.”

One more stop, in a greeting card store, and Jack was ready. She pocketed her ID tag, prompting Kyra to do the same, before pushing through the outer doors, instantly feeling relief when she spotted the freestylers still performing.

“Hey kid!” she called out to the obvious ringleader of the group.

The kids tensed. Their leader, however, puffed up on the spot.

“What, you think you some rent-a-cop? Gonna tell us to get lost? Who you callin’ a kid anyway? You look like you twelve!”

Jack grinned and rolled her eyes. “Ease up. I’m not here to chase you off or anything. Damn, even gettin’ a degree don’t help. People still think I’m a little kid. I’m gonna be gettin’ carded when I’m fifty. Shit.”

The kids laughed, relaxing.

“So you ain’t here to roll us, what you want?”

“You wanna make some money helping me out?”

The ringleader smirked. “Depends on what kind of help you need.”

“Okay, it’s like this,” Jack began. She hoped Kyra would play along with the wild ride she was about to take them on. “My brother Travi is a grade-A douchebag sometimes. I love him, but it’s the truth. Douchebag. Anyway, he fucked up on the royal the other night and now his fiancée is pissed at him and, like, threw the ring at him and told him she’s taking off for the Janus systems. Like, seriously, he’s totally unworthy of her but we all love her and want them to stay together. I mean, I’d trade him in for her in a heartbeat, you feel?”

The kids listened, their expressions still a little dubious.

“Yeah, and?” their leader prompted.

“So she’s got her ticket and everything, and she blocked his comm number, and all of our numbers. And he’s off feeling sorry for himself because he’s that doofed, you feel?”

The kids nodded.

“So I figure, she’s not gonna talk to me, if I walk up to her she’ll walk right off, maybe get security to roll me, but maybe if she gets a kind of… singing telegram that she thinks is from him…”

“You want us to do our thing for her?” The leader asked, his eyes lighting up.

“Yeah, and give her this.” Jack handed over the card. Covered in hearts and frills, with a sappy message inside and an even sappier inscription, done in her best imitation of her cousin Joey’s handwriting:

Please forgive me.
I never meant to hurt you.
You are my world and I’m lost without you.
Call me.

She’d even added a comm number, using the Al-Walid household’s number but with the last three digits changed. If Eve Logan tried to call it, she’d end up speaking to someone who had no idea what was going on.

The group’s leader grinned and accepted the card, along with the wad of cash Jack had taken out of the snakeskin wallet.

“I’m gonna record it all,” she said, brandishing the hapless traveler’s comm, “so when she hopefully tells my brother she forgives him and thanks him for it, he’ll know what it is he’s supposed to have done. But she can’t see me, okay? She’ll rabbit if she sees me.”

“Okay, we’re in. Who is she and what does she look like?”

“Gina Stansfield,” Jack told them, and then described Logan to them in detail. It was a level of detail that only someone intimately acquainted with a person — or someone, like Jack, with eidetic recall — could manage. She knew that she had sealed the deal with it. Then she gave them directions to the place Logan had staked out.

The little troupe crackled with energy as they led the way back to Logan, chattering about dance move combinations. Jack let a bit of distance build. Stopping at a random door, she keyed in one of her ghost codes. For the next ten minutes, nothing in the vicinity of the Matador’s gate would be recorded. And the randomized loops at the security desks would omit those cameras altogether. There would, sadly, be no record of what was about to happen.

Logan was so focused on scanning the crowd that she had looked at, and mentally dismissed, the entire troupe before they suddenly had her surrounded.

“This song’s for you, Gina!” The leader boomed, catching the attention of everyone in the causeway.

The kids were damned good. Along the way, they must have planned out which routines they intended to use. They ringed Eve’s bench, moving in remarkable synchrony as they danced, spun, flipped, and wove together a three-part harmony backup tune for their leader.

“Baby I was wrong,” he belted in a stunning tenor, “So listen to my song…”

Pulling out the stolen comm and holding it in front of her face, Jack approached the group with Kyra behind her, blocked from Logan’s view.

“Gina don’t you know
You’re up in my soul
There’s nothin’ I won’t do for love
And babe, you’re all I’m thinkin’ of…”

Still pretending to record the performance, Jack circled wide, not even trying to go near the Matador’s gate, keeping her face hidden and her body interposed between Kyra and Logan. The kids were drawing a crowd.

“Come back to me Gina
You know I’m always yours…”

People were clapping and cheering. If Jack had really been recording the performance, their bodies would now be in the way. She finished circling, standing in front of the maintenance door. Glancing over at it, she punched in the code and ushered Kyra through.

The door closed as the group’s leader presented Logan with the card. “Travi says he’s sorry for how he hurt you. Please call him, yeah?”

The crowd erupted with applause as the door clicked shut.

“You… are… insane.” Kyra whispered, a mile-wide grin on her face.

Jack reattached her nametag, gesturing for Kyra to do the same, but was unable to suppress a grin of her own. “Come on. We’re twenty minutes behind schedule.”

But the rest ended up being all too easy. An hour later, hidden away in a utility closet by the cryo-lockers, they got to listen to embarking passengers griping about the mercenaries who had insisted on looking each of them over before they were allowed to board. The hardest part was liftoff, which they had to endure with less padding than the other passengers, but even that couldn’t dent their sense of giddy triumph. Jack had spent the pre-boarding time programming their tubes and the special security routines that would apply to them; once all of the passengers and crew members had gone to sleep, it was finally their turn. The “defective” units turned on for them immediately.

Kyra had never worked a cryo tube, so Jack helped her in and got her settled, feeling like an old hand. Climbing into her own tube and settling in, she snickered at the image of Eve Logan surrounded by the freestylers. She had already disposed of the stolen comm, but part of her wished she had really recorded the performance.

As sleep claimed her, she could be forgiven for thinking that the worst was finally behind her. But it would be a very long time before she would forgive herself for it.