shadowrun 40 The Burning Time
"There’s so much going on these days. People have been celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Awakening all year long. Salem’s been especially active. That’s where my granddaughter lives. Did I tell you she’s a witch? Must take after her grandmother there." Lou chuckled at his own joke.
    Roy gave a short laugh in return. The anniversary didn’t mean that much to him, but he’d been following the mixture of hoopla and panic surrounding Halley’s comet with some interest. "Thanks for the tip, Lou. Maybe I’ll have some time when I’m done here. For now, there’s no rest for the wicked." He hefted his cyberdeck case to say that he had to go back to work.
    The ork nodded. "I hear you. Have a good one."
    "You too," Roy said, and went out through the building’s sliding doors. The sky had begun to darken over with clouds since he’d arrived this morning, and he wondered if it was going to snow.
    He’d spent the morning poking around in the facility’s computer systems without turning up anything definite. Dan Otabi’s sudden appearance had been interesting, though. Roy could tell he was nervous, maybe even scared, and that was suspicious.
    He reached his car and told his headware to send the coded unlocking signal via the tiny radio transmitter in his skull. The alarm system beeped twice, and the headlights flashed him a greeting as he popped open the door and slid behind the wheel of the rented Nissan-Chrysler Spirit. He dropped his case onto the passenger seat beside him.
    Yeah, Otabi’s sudden appearance had been interesting. Roy had chosen his cubicle on purpose, of course. A talk with Otabi’s manager had clued Roy to the man’s reclusive, almost anti-social tendencies, which made him a prime candidate for whoever had doctored the facility’s telecom records. Plus, Otabi was a data-management specialist, and he had the skills to pull it off. Unfortunately, Otabi or not, the intruder hadn’t left any fingerprints behind in the system that Roy could find.
    He thought again about the look on Otabi’s face when he saw Roy sitting at his terminal. He looked guilty, but nobody would accept that as proof of wrongdoing. If Roy was wrong, or if the guy simply decided to dig in his heels and deny everything, Roy would have problems of his own before this was all over. If he was going to score points with the big bosses in Québec, he needed to deliver the whole thing wrapped up like a present, showing how he’d taken care of a threat to CATco on his own.
    He tapped in the ignition sequence onto the steering keypad. Let’s find out where Mr. Otabi lives, he thought, pulling out of the company lot. As he drove through the gate and onto the street, Roy called up the personnel files he’d downloaded into his headware.
    He tapped Dan Otabi’s home address into the car’s onboard system, then headed for the highway that would take him there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    Talon sipped his rapidly cooling soykaf from a paper cup, willing the bio-chemicals in it to kick-start his body. He was tired and listless after a night of restless sleep, and for once he was grateful even for the watery-gray light of an overcast day. The chill December wind had chased a fair number of people into the Java-Hut for a cup of something warm. Or lukewarm, as the case might be, Talon thought, swirling the soykaf around in his mouth before swallowing. There was something that made soykaf lose heat faster than any other substance known to man.
    The door opened, bringing with it a blast of cold air and a new arrival in the form of Trouble, who Talon had been waiting for. Her real name was Ariel Tyson, of course, but the handle suited her. She and Talon had first met over the barrel of an Are Predator she’d been pointing at him. Someone had hired her to dig into his past, someone who wanted to lure him back to Boston from DeeCee, where he’d been shadowrunning with the team of Assets, Inc. Trouble was the bait, designed to help lure him in.

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