Chapter 01
In the eerie silence only troubled by the noise of the crowd in the street below, Jen started to search the room, knowing that keeping her hands busy was the only thing she could do to not stop and cry on his death.
His cyber-deck, a cold slice of pizza on the table, a spare set of wires, a filthy old jacket, his ID and credit card, the holo-vid set displaying the latest news in the background, and a bed that hadn’t even been touched. This wouldn’t take her far. There weren’t even any clothes in the cupboard; Alt had never meant to stay here. Swearing between her gritted teeth, the young woman grabbed the jacket and searched the pockets as well, tossing an electronic key and an ER Medicard on the ground at her feet, only to realize that whatever her friend had wanted to give her, it wasn’t in there.
Outside, the regular hubbub of voices had shifted to rumblings of unease and curiosity; the sound of a car stopping right in front of the hotel told her that she didn’t have any more time, and in a fast move, she grabbed the cards as well as Alt’s deck to hide them in one of the large inner pockets of her coat.
Jen walked to the window, pausing for a second to quickly peer through the shutters. A long dark car was now stationed four stories below in Conestoga Street, right under the room’s window, and she squinted, trying to discern the logo on the hoof and side doors. A red square, perhaps, unless it was a circle? It looked much like a circle to her, a circle like the Townsend’s, dark red, marked by a T in its center. Dangerous fellows, whose path shouldn’t be crossed too often.
From what she knew of their standard procedure, an intervention team was certainly stationed on the other side of the building as well, and taking risks wasn’t an option. With luck, the Agents would first search another room; no self-respecting Wizard would ever have entered the Web, especially not in full-dive mode, from the connection set in his own room. However, this could turn to be a problem for her. She couldn’t know which room was safe and which wasn’t, and this only left her with two ways of escaping. Climbing through the window and along the facade was a sport she wasn’t very keen on, and it would have made her too noticeable a target from the street; the other solution was to go out the way she had come in, attempting at passing for an innocent customer of the hotel, if anyone could ever be really innocent here.
Again, she swore, turning back to head for the corridor. Her eyes immediately caught the flashing light above the door of the lift, at the other end, indicating that it had stopped on the floor below.
“Crap. Thirty seconds”, Jen muttered to herself, zipping her coat to make sure that the cyber-deck inside wouldn’t get any chance of falling, while still leaving enough of an opening for her to grab her gun if she needed to.