She drank more. The up was so clean. It steadied her nerves, made her want to move.
“My name is Nadie.” The merc held out a strong, small hand that gripped hers with calibrated firmness.
“I’m – Iceweasel.”
Nadie smiled, small square teeth. “I know. We were inside your nets for two days before I took you. Wasn’t hard.”
“It’s not supposed to be,” Iceweasel said. “We want people to read the public stuff. Almost everyone isn’t a zotta, which means that almost everyone should join the walkaways.”
“Some zottas join, too.” Nadie had this Russian – Bulgarian? Belarusian? – deadpan thing, the corner of her mouth a precursor to a smirk, a deniable microexpression that registered nevertheless.
“Some do.”
“I’m interested in the information security aspect of our earlier conversation.”
“Does that mean we have a deal?”
“No.” Nadie’s microexpression flickered. “We don’t have a deal. Calm yourself.” She pointed to a readout on the bed that alerted as Iceweasel’s heart-rate and endocrine signifiers thwacked the red zone.
Iceweasel made herself breathe. Nadie was playing head games. That’s what she’d done from the start. It would be delusional to hope for anything else.
“I’m calming.”
“I want to know about infowar. I know you had no jailbroken devices you could use to probe and pwn the safe-room. I searched you. No one who comes in is allowed to bring anything that could be used to launch an attack, except your father, and even he submits to an inventory whenever he leaves. The attack came from outside, which should be setting off IDS alarms. That’s not happening. There’s something very bad that I never noticed. This makes me feel foolish.”
“I don’t think less of you.”
A microexpression telegraphing dark amusement. The woman was a savant of emotion-hockey.
“I hope not. I hope you understand I’m a serious person, and I’m not your friend. I’m not your enemy, either, though I have been your opponent. I’m very good at what I do. Good enough that you want to be straight with me. Good enough that if we end up enemies, it should worry you.”
Her microexpression changed, a glint that made her feel frightened a centimeter below her navel. Like the fear she’d felt once, trekking near the B&B. There’d been a wolf. It looked at her in a way that made her certain it had mapped every possible thing she might do, anticipated countermoves. It effectively owned her. She was only breathing because it suffered her to. She tried to stay calm. The stupid bed-monitor ratted her out, its infographics redlining in her peripheral vision. She expected Nadie to smirk, or micro-smirk, but she held that bad-ass look for another moment.
“I see you understand. Let us talk about the network.”
Iceweasel felt for her bravery. “I don’t think so. I’ve given you knowledge of the network situation. Why should I give you something more?”
She nodded, acknowledging the point. “More coffee?” Subtext How about this black magic; a fair trade, wasn’t it?
“Absolutely.” Black liquid poured in a silky river from carafe to pot. “I’m still not going to tell you more about the network. Not until we have a deal.”
“It’s not a stupid position, though you know that now I can get to the bottom of it myself. My employers have procedures. They’ll pull everything in the building in twelve hours, take it away for forensics while new patched and locked stuff is installed here.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“You’re counting on the fact I’ll get more money from freeing you than I would from helping your father.”
“I’m hoping for that. It helps that my father is an asshole. I’m hoping you find working for him so offensive that the chance to get away and fuck him over and help me and get rich is tempting.”
The micro-smirk returned: touché. “Your father is in a difficult position.”
“My father deserves to swing from a lamp post.”
“A difficult position, I think you’ll agree.”
“You didn’t disagree with my assessment.”
“I’ve seen people swing from lamp posts. It’s not nice.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
More coffee. The second caffeine rush wasn’t as good as the first, which she remembered hearing, caffeine adaptation was faster than with coffium’s cocktail of neuroticklers. You had to keep upping the dose to get to the same place, or wait out tedious refractory periods before you could recapture the rush.
“People swinging from lamp posts, huh?”
“Twice. I didn’t put them there.”
“Who did?”
“People like me, to tell the truth. People working for rich people, taking money under orders, to send a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“Don’t fuck with my boss or you’ll hang from a lamp post.”
“But you never hung anyone from a lamp post.”
“Never hung anyone from anything. That’s not my kind of work. I’ve been asked to do it.”
“You get to say no to that kind of boss?”
“I’m good at my job. I get to say, ‘Let me explain to you why this will make things worse. Let me explain how this will make people who don’t think you’re the enemy decide they have to kill you before you kill them. Let me explain what I can do to neutralize people who want to harm you.”
“You mean, infiltrate their networks, kidnap them—”
“Yes-no. Map the social graph, find the leaders, dox them, discredit them. Kidnap if you have to, but that makes martyrs, so not so much. Better to make them busy with fighting fires. I know other contractors who’ll crawl a culture’s chat-channels and boards and model the weak points, find the old fights that still simmer, create strategy for flaring them. So easy to infiltrate. Once they think they’re infiltrated, they point at one another, wondering who is a mole and who is true. It’s neater than bodies swinging from lamp posts. Tidier. Not so many flies.”
“Ha ha.”
“You don’t like it. I work for your enemies, destroy what you’re building.” She shrugged. “I don’t do it because I hate you. Sometimes I admire you, even. But I’m good at my job. If you want to succeed, you have to be good at your job. Someone else would do my job if I didn’t, so unless you’re better at your job than people like me are at ours, you’re doomed anyway.”
The infographic pulsed red. “I fucking hate that thing.”
“I don’t mind that you’re upset. I’m saying upsetting things. If I was you, I’d be upset. I understand you don’t do what you do for job, but for love. You want to save the world. Saving the world is good, but I don’t think you will manage. I don’t think anyone can. Human nature. If the world is doomed, I want to be comfortable until it goes up, boom.”
“It sounds like you’re saying you’re interested in my trust fund.”
“I am very interested in your trust fund, Natalie. Iceweasel. I believe there are structural challenges to getting my hands on it, but I also think there are people in my orbit who know how to make structural challenges go away. They will need paying, of course, but—”
“But you’ll be able to afford it.”
“I can afford it now. I am good at my job. I get well paid. My contacts would do it for commission, but that would be much more. I prefer to pay cash, even if that risks my money.”
She poured herself more coffee, brought it to her lips, didn’t drink, looked over the black mirror of its surface. Her hand was rock steady, her eyes cool as glacial ice. “You know I can find you. No matter where you go, what you do, I can find you.”