The Armor Heist Read online

  The Armor Heist

  A Short Story in the Bright Future

  by D. Clarence Snyder

  Copyright 2015 by D. Snyder

  Smashwords Edition

  License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  The Armor Heist

  About the Author

  Also by D. Clarence Snyder

  The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. -Sun Tzu

  The Armor Heist

  “Have you ever killed anyone before?” a voice in the darkness asked. Given the circumstances, it seemed like a rookie question. Anyone who answered ‘yes’ would be confessing to a crime. No one ever would.

  “You know who I am?” Ægis responded. He was doing his best to remain calm and professional. He was not sure where he was, or who had him, but the list of possibilities was short. He had been snatched from his apartment by large men wearing body armor. He was sure that he had not been read any sort of official statement advising him that he was in custody. That meant it was unlikely he had been arrested by municipal police. Government forces had a long history of using official statements. They might have seen him as dangerous enough to use overwhelming force, but traditional police would have delivered their statements after he was chained down with a bag over his head.

  “I do,” the voice admitted. “Let me get that for you.”

  The bag was lifted away and Ægis’s eyes were flooded with information. He blinked rapidly as his irises expanded to constrict his pupils. Sudden immersion into light was disorienting, but that was the point.

  The room did not look like a government facility. Municipal police interview rooms tended to be light in color; crèmes, blues, or industrial grays. In his experience, they were dominated by observation windows. “One-way” glass gave the impression that the rooms were decorated with large mirrors, but it didn’t fool anyone. Government interview rooms smelled as if they had been washed. They had a damp, chalky odor, covered by hints of floor wax and cleaning products.

  This room had black walls textured with uniform pyramids of charcoal foam. The floor wasn’t tiled; it was carpeted. Despite the dark color, the space was well lit by a polymer lighting panel. It was too well lit. There was no table, no pretext of alternate use. It was a soundproofed interrogation chamber. It didn’t smell like anything. It was definitely corporate.

  Ægis could think of four nation-status corporations that might want to interrogate him at that moment. All of them had the means, the motivation, and the time to get whatever information they wanted from him.

  The interrogator neatly folded the bag into a triangle. He seemed irritated, but he casually put the triangle into his pocket. “They were supposed to remove that before I came in.”

  The interrogator was Dr. Matthew Redds. He was not a rookie. In fact, he was one of the most experienced interrogators in the geographic nation. He taught classes on interview technique and held a PhD in psychology. His thesis on human reactive behavior was required reading at a certain federal police academy. He didn’t ask interviewees about their past crimes in the hopes of getting confessions. He used such questions to learn what sort of person he was dealing with. How the subject answered could tell Dr. Redds a lot about who was in the chair.

  In one exchange, Dr. Redds knew Ægis had been interrogated before.

  A casual, pleasant conversation would set the subject at ease. It would make getting good information from him easier. If Ægis were combative, Dr. Redds would have to make inferences. It served his purposes to be pleasant, but he also needed to guide the conversation to the information he wanted.

  “Do you mind if I sit down?” Dr. Redds asked.

  “Uh, sure?” Of all the things he expected an interrogator to ask, his permission was not one.

  A panel opened in the wall, and a cute blond girl brought in a chair for the doctor. She was dressed in a dark navy business suit with pants. Her jacket was open and revealed a low cut off-white blouse. It was distracting but remained professional. It seemed like it was a uniform, but it bore no identifying badges.

  She left the door open as she carried the chair to a place opposite Ægis and set it down. Bright light streamed into the room. It was obviously the way out, but Ægis could not see what was on the other side of the door. After the girl positioned the chair, she stood up and smiled at Ægis. Without saying a word, she turned and walked out of the room. The panel closed and Ægis was sealed in again.

  The chair, the girl, and the door were part of the show. By having the chair brought in, Dr. Redds gave his interviewee the idea that there was a way out of the room. Ægis just had to cooperate. The interrogation could even be pleasant. Dr. Redds did not have to offer anything; he didn’t have to say anything; the idea was there.

  Dr. Redds sat down and rested his shoulders against the back of the chair. “I looked you up. Your mercenary profile card says you’ve been doing this a while, but there’s no body count. Not even a made up one?”

  “I specialize in long range sniping and support. If a job goes well, no one knows I was part of it.”

  “So you have dropped the hammer on a human.” Dr. Redds slipped into speaking like an armed professional. When dealing with mercenaries, it helped establish rapport.

  “I used to be military.” It was not an answer, except that it was.

  If Dr. Redds's practice was psychiatry instead of psychology, the men might spend hours talking about military experience. Instead, he simply nodded. “So, what was your MOS?”

  Ægis was a licensed mercenary in the city. The interrogator was asking questions he could just as easily look up on his smart phone. Ægis knew that establishing rapport was an important part of the interrogation process – not just for the interrogator. It was also important for the captive to establish how the interrogator would treat him. If Ægis tried to resist telling him anything, the interrogator would change techniques. Pain, disorientation, and specifically engineered drugs could all be employed to convince Ægis to give up any information he had. If his captors had the time, he would eventually reveal anything they wanted to know. The value of resistance was in delaying his interrogators. He could only hope to conceal information for the time that it was useful.

  The job was already done. They had failed. Ægis was caught. He couldn’t think of anything he knew about it that was still of value. He would be cooperative, at least until he figured out what the interrogator wanted. He had a few questions of his own, which he hoped the interrogator might answer.

  “You mean my military job?” Ægis restated the question. “I was a scout/sniper. Basically the same thing I am now.”

  “You guys always work in pairs, right? How’s that translate to mercenary sniping?”

  “We don’t always work in pairs. Sometimes your observer is a robot, or, if the mission calls for it, you’re hanging in the wind.”

  “No support, no backup? That’s got to suck.” Dr. Redds demonstrated a sympathetic ear. He had never carried a weapon, himself, but he had learned how to talk as if he had for just such interviews. Soldiers had their own way of speaking, their own body language. Strangely, they never seemed to keep secrets from each other. It worked if they thought he was one of them, too.

  Ægis shrugged bashfully. “You know, you do good mission planning. Get all the intel you can. React and ada
pt when things go south. Work your field craft, but if things are just wrong, you abort.”

  “Do you do your own mission planning?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. You always have input, but the mission’s the mission, you’re just there to execute the objective.”

  Dr. Redds knew that Ægis didn’t necessarily mean ‘kill someone,’ but ‘execute’ had several, convenient definitions. “Still, on a long rope like that, you gotta know how to recognize when things go bad, right?”

  “Yeah, of course.” Ægis was having an easy time just chatting. It was still the ‘getting to know you’ part of the interview, but he was forgetting that his wrists and ankles were chained to a chair.

  “So, you knew this mission, right?” Dr. Redds prompted. “You were on it from plan to execution, weren’t you?”

  “Uh.” Ægis paused. He considered whether his answer would constitute confessing to a crime.

  Dr. Redds quickly let him off the hook. “I mean I’m wondering, in your professional opinion, where do you think it went wrong?”

  Monday Morning

  Canbe was an attractive, physically fit woman in her late twenties. Her resume, as a mercenary, was short. She did not admit to many of her gigs. It was normal for mercenaries to be secretive about some jobs, but she tried to keep them all secret. Ægis had only actually worked with her on a job once, but Canbe was a talented forger. He had bought counterfeit identity cards and smart keys from her on several occasions. Her real specialty, though, was infiltration.

  Canbe could completely change how she looked. This gave her an uncanny ability to enter places, steal things, and leave. Ægis did not know if Canbe had synthetic parts that could change the shape of her face or if her face was completely removable. What he knew was that when she had to run away, she never looked like whoever the security guards were after.

  She was meticulous and methodical. Canbe knew how to evaluate a place. She could see all the ingress and egress routes, find the observation posts, hidden cameras, and where the guards would be. She was very good at relaying that information, too. She denied it, but Ægis was sure she had been a reconnaissance scout for some military. Her ability to disguise herself would have made her an excellent spy. She denied that, too, but if she had worked for a “three letter agency,” she would have denied it.

  They got along well because of their professional personalities.

  Pigeon was their opposite. He was a wiry man in his mid-twenties. He had been working as a mercenary courier since he graduated high school, and he listed every successful job he had worked. As a courier, he had to move fast and plan on the fly. Pigeon didn’t have military experience, but he knew everything about it – everything he could read in an ebook or watch in a video online. He almost always worked alone.

  He irritated Ægis, but Pigeon was a good courier. If a job called for moving something from one place to another, Ægis would use Pigeon. Pigeon had even transported Ægis as cargo, on occasion.

  When Pigeon called Ægis with a gig, Ægis knew it had to be a tough one. After Pigeon explained the job, Ægis called Canbe. He really wanted three more guys, but it was Pigeon’s gig. Pigeon was not going to split the fee more than three ways, and they had to be ready to go in less than forty-eight hours.

  Canbe sat on a workbench in Pigeon’s garage. The smell of grease seeped into a set of grey coveralls she wore over a pair of tight jeans and a concert t-shirt. The air exuded macho and made her feel like she should talk out of the side of her mouth. Instead, she tied her mottled brown hair into a ponytail, giving her a tomboy look.

  Technically, the garage belonged to Pigeon’s father. It was a professional maintenance bay he let Pigeon use to work on his courier vehicles. Before drugs had been legalized, Pigeon’s father had been a bootlegger and smuggler. He operated a chain of auto-mechanic shops out of convenience. The garages were profitable, but Pigeon’s work was the spiritual descendant of his father’s smuggling. Keeping one bay unused for when Pigeon needed it was a matter of familial pride.

  Pigeon had been startled that Canbe was waiting for him and Ægis. She was able to break into the garage and put on a worker’s uniform without tripping the building’s alarm system. It was proof that she was everything Ægis had claimed.

  “I need you to steal an armored car,” Pigeon explained.

  “What’s in it?” Canbe asked flatly.

  “Money,” Pigeon answered. “Like five tons in metal bars.”

  “Not interested.” Canbe jumped off the bench and stepped toward the door. She was a thief by trade, but she stole items and data that other people paid her to retrieve. Robbing an armored car meant finding a buyer for the precious metals. The only armored car services in the city were nation-status corporations, and they had strong ties to the banks, which were also sovereign states. If they were successful at stealing even a single gold bar, they could never spend it.

  “The contents of the truck don't matter,” Ægis stopped her. “In a perfect plan it would be filled with iron shavings. We need the truck itself.”

  Canbe was intrigued. She looked back and forth between the two men. “Why?”

  “Microsoft has a new entertainment console,” Pigeon explained. “It’s not just one generation up. Supposed to be a quantum leap forward. They have a competitor who offered a ridiculous bounty on a prototype.”

  “And you know where one is?”

  “Sort of.” Pigeon continued, “This competitor turned one of the developers. The guy stole one and shipped it out of Gates City. It’s on its way to…”

  Canbe interrupted him. “Shipped it? You mean he actually put it on a Parcel Service truck?”

  “Complete with a tracking number for the package.” Ægis smiled.

  “Microsoft caught the guy and extracted the number,” Pigeon continued the story. “They’ve got a half-million dollars out to get that package back.”

  “So you want to hit a Parcel Service truck and recover the box from it?” She waited for Ægis to nod. “Where’s the armored truck full of gold or iron come in?”

  “You remember how bad the Shipping Wars were here?”

  Canbe glanced at Ægis before returning her attention to Pigeon. “Let’s say I’m younger than I look and I lived in a different city then.”

  “Um.” Pigeon had only studied the Shipping Wars in school and watched documentaries about them. He did not remember them, personally, but he assumed everyone knew about them. Canbe was asserting that she did not. “You know the construction materials dump on the south side? Thirty years ago, that was a neighborhood. It got reduced to rubble in one day. It was a week before Christmas.” He summarized, “It was bad.”

  “Okay, but they ended,” Canbe pointed out the obvious. “All the shipping companies merged into one nation entity, ‘Parcel Service’.” She didn't know about the local battles, but she had read the plaque at the Post Office.

  “Technically there are still three nation-status corporations who do small package transportation: Brinkloom Sovereign Security Services, Applied Violence Incorporated, and Parcel Service.” Pigeon may have seemed imprecise to Canbe and Ægis, but he knew the business of transporting things. “All three of them have hubs in or near the city. Brinkloom and AVI are competitors. They don’t step on Parcel Service, but they’re professional militaries, and Parcel Service knows it. All the delivery trucks in the city are armored.”

  Canbe understood. “So you want to block Parcel Service’s armored car with another one?”

  “Exactly.” Pigeon explained.

  “If we’re stealing a truck, why not just steal the Parcel Service one?”

  “Because the Parcel Service truck is only useful once it has the package on it. And, I know where the keys are for another one.”

  Monday Evening

  Maria Lynch had been an armored car driver for six months. She had a federal driver’s license for heavy vehicles and a city permit to bear arms. She had gotten both before applying for a job with the corporate
state “Brinkloom Sovereign Security Services.” The licenses were not required; Brinkloom trained new hires and sponsored the necessary paperwork at an academy, but having them had made her a “preferential hire.”

  Maria was short compared to most of her coworkers, but she was deceptively strong. She kept her hair and nails short. She did not wear make-up when she worked. Beauty was a tertiary concern for her. Like most working people, she was attractive; she just didn’t waste effort worrying about her appearance. Instead, she worried more about doing her job well. She wasn’t the only woman at Brinkloom’s hub in the city, but she was the only one on her truck’s crew.

  Officer Lynch was not a corporate citizen. She could apply for citizenship when her probationary period ended in a few weeks, but she did not plan to. She could use Brinkloom medical facilities and grocery stores, but she paid full price at them. Her salary was paid completely in dollars. That suited her. Her small apartment was in municipal territory. It was closer to a Wal-Mart village than Brinkloom’s facilities. After driving twenty-five tons of truck and cargo all day, she was happy to walk to the grocery store.

  Maria arrived at her apartment with an armful of groceries. She did not notice that her door was already unlocked when she pressed her key to the pad. She was inside and had pushed the door closed with her foot before she noticed that one of her uniforms was laid out on her dinner table.

  Stranger than that was the blonde woman standing in her living room.

  Canbe casually aimed her pistol at Maria. “Please remain calm. I am not alone, and we do not wish to hurt you.”

  Maria’s own pistol was in a holster on her hip. She shifted her weight, preparing to drop her groceries and draw her weapon.

  “Don’t,” Canbe directed. “I don’t know if you have eggs in there, but it would be a shame to drop three bags of groceries just to get into a gunfight.”

  “What do you want?” Maria asked.

  “I want you to hold still for a moment, while I take your pistol. Then, you’ll put your groceries away.”