Virtual Identity: A ViPR Cyber Investigation (Our Cyber World Book 9) by Eduardo Suastegui

Author:Eduardo Suastegui [Suastegui, Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eduardo Suastegui
Published: 2016-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

Waypoint

If someone had told Rod they’d still be in here, in this basement, with a dead body starting to smell in spite of the room’s cool temperature, while Sasha banged away at the computers, he would’ve laughed. By now they should be going after something real, maybe calling Cynthia to bring in reinforcements in a couple of helos so they could fly… where?

There flapped the problem, sticking its tongue right back at him.

Seeing her stuck, taking longer than he’d prefer, Rod told Sasha, “You better go back to Westwood. I’ll find transportation.”

“Sure, lots of cars around. Just hotwire one, and go where, exactly?” She kept click-clacking on the keyboard, without looking at him.

He sat there, staring at the back of her head, without much of an answer. Yeah, unless he called Cynthia, he still needed Sasha.

And he didn’t want to call Cynthia. Not yet. Not until he found Sandra. On his own terms.

He’d get to her and tell her: someone had let her have those chips. No, she shouldn’t go on imagining she’d had some source of hers grab a couple of microchip rejects off the bin, because no one needed them any longer for pilot heads-up displays, since, you know, the newer and enhanced version had come out. No, someone in power had wanted her to have those chips.

He wanted to tell her that constituted the real setup. Not somebody spoofing her identity. Nor her VirtualMe clone copy. Someone had set her up, saying, here, these chips are awesome for heads-up displays, and couldn’t she see how that technology would fold into some sweet virtual reality killer apps? Come on. Visualize it, baby. Oh, and look, she already had a boyfriend that could literally embed the whole big idea in her head.

Yeah, he wanted to tell her that, one on one, face to face. Someone owed her that. Except he couldn’t have told her up front, first because he didn’t have the full picture, not until he overheard her conversation with that Erik Estrada surgeon hack. And second because Cynthia wouldn’t let him.

He couldn’t know for sure—hadn’t been read in all way into that compartment, he guessed. But Cynthia knew more. Like she’d known about Victor without telling Rod. She knew who had cooked up this whole thing, who had set up a game programmer as the unwitting prototype, and she knew who’d gotten worried enough to bring her in as the clean-up lady.

Rod knew this much, though: Cynthia only got calls from on high. She didn’t take who-gives-a-flip assignments. Officially, she wasn’t even in the Collections team anymore. Bringing her in meant someone with the big levers had pulled—and hard.

He’d known that from the beginning—had ached about it from the inside the moment he saw Sandra in that interrogation room, dressed in nothing but her thin lacy underwear. It had made him sick. It had clicked a trigger. It had reaffirmed things. Rod was sick of this game. Sick of being stuck in it with nothing but half-truths.

Which is why he had to get to Sandra, to tell her, and to do… What? Keep her safe.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.