Silhouette

Book 1: The Peacer Series

by Dave Swavely

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Minority Report meets Blade Runner as a man must solve his daughter's murder only to find that the trail leads right back to himself in Dave Swavely's Silhouette, the first of The Peacer Series

A post-quake San Francisco is ruled by a private corporation called the Bay Area Security Service. Its founder, Saul Rabin, is revered by many as the savior of the city, but by others he is feared and loathed as a fascist tyrant. And because of the cutting-edge antigravity technology being developed by his company, this controversial figure is about to become the most powerful man in the world.

To his protégé, Michael Ares, the old man is a mysterious benefactor whom he respects and admires. But when Michael's daughter and best friend are brutally murdered, he follows a trail of evidence that leads dangerously close to home. Closer than he could ever imagine.

A future world of aerocars, net glasses, and neural cyberware provides the backdrop for this timeless tale of good and evil, revenge and love, infamy and destiny. Fans of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell will love this page-turner filled with thought-provoking images of dark shapes which, despite their pain and power, could never blot out the light that surrounds them.

Release date: November 13, 2012

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

UNMASKED
A Prequel Short Story

In Dave Swavely's upcoming novel Silhouette, Michael Ares is a war hero hired and given a license to kill by an autocratic regime determined to "keep the peace" in a post-quake San Francisco of the future. He faces a gauntlet of trials on his way to either death or glory, including the impossible dilemma of investigating a murder where all the evidence leads back to him. This is the story of an episode from Michael's past that is mentioned in Silhouette and comes back to haunt him during the events in the novel. And it is a story about some fine lines that are very hard to walk.

**********

Keren Reyes was convinced that the man sitting at a table in the Embarcadero Plaza was the killer--something about a mask, which she would explain to me when I arrived. So I parked far enough away and stayed out of his line of sight as I walked to her position. Many of the citizens of San Francisco knew my face, and the man would definitely recognize me if he was a peacer as Reyes suspected, because that would mean we worked for the same company.

The term "peacer," which had become the post-quake moniker of choice for our law enforcement officers, was considered ironic by our critics, and would indeed prove to be so in this case, if it was one of us who murdered and mutilated three people in cold blood. Especially if those in charge of him were okay with it.

Reyes was a peacer herself, and a good one who had proven trustworthy through years of experience with the Bay Area Security Service (BASS for short). So I had taken it very seriously when she told me her theory about the perp being an employee—seriously enough to ask her to keep it between us at this point, and seriously enough to leave the castle to deal with it myself. I wasn't on the streets as much as I used to be, now that I was an "executive peacer," so it felt good to strap on my guns and possibly see some action for a change. And as it turned out, I wasn't disappointed.

As I made my way toward Reyes' position, I slipped my glasses on and reviewed the news report (if you could call it that) that she had sent me, which was a big part of my motivation to handle this myself, in a discreet manner. BASS's most vocal critic on the net had the same theory as Reyes, but for different reasons—unless he was just lying and using the murders as an excuse for more of his blatant propaganda, which was quite possible.

Either way, Harris was a PR problem waiting to happen. He was the leader of a group of "revolutionaries" (we called them "squatters") who invaded and made their home in our Red Tunnel, one of three big ones in a system of underground passages that BASS had installed in the months following the quake. The tunnels snaked out to various parts of the city from the thirty-story above-ground headquarters we had built on the top of Nob Hill, known affectionately as the castle. The access provided by the tunnels was a key tool in maintaining order in the city and establishing our authority over it in those early days. It's a good thing we developed better ways to mobilize, because this one was now controlled by a twisted version of Robin Hood and his merry band.

Within days of their invasion of the Red Tunnel, Harris and the squatters had impressively managed to overhaul the power and water systems so that they could live in that portion of the tunnel, and they had armed themselves sufficiently so that the only way we could remove them was by lethal force. And since they had already been flooding the web with propaganda against us (and now from right under our nose), BASS leadership made the decision to leave them there, at least for the time being, rather than make them martyrs. One example of such propaganda was the video of Harris that I was now watching in part of the view inside my glasses. I had seen it earlier when Reyes first sent me the link, but had to review it again because it was hard for me to understand everything that the freak was saying.

"Hotter than Hellboy, with news in the Babellian dialect of the Entertainnet, featuring features from today and from the sacred dawn of modern media, A.K.A. the century before this one. Bringing you some more Tabloid Dirt on the BigAss and their Nazi tyrant, and this one hits close to home. You know I get by with a little help from my friends," he sang that part. "Some of them were doing a Milk Run into the city by the bay-ay," singing again, "and they never came back."

Harris's tattoos stretched out toward the viewer and morphed into pictures and videos of two naked bodies, one male and one female. They were inked all over like he was, but with gaping wounds and drying blood interspersed with the body art. The male body had been castrated, and the high-res, close-up images left nothing to the imagination.

"You may have Total Recall that on December 6 of last year we found the corpse of one of our fellow civil rights champions in a Crime Alley in the city. She was martyr to a god no one believed in..."

He sang the last line, which was from a popular Prisoner song that I actually recognized, unlike the last one. But I was pretty sure the lyrics had nothing to do with how he was using them.

"Some of us are Handy Dandys with ballistics—remember I was a peacer (insert laughter) myself at one time, and others among us have worked for the COPS too."

When he said "insert laughter" as he always did when he mentioned the word "peacer," he also made the gesture that he was in the habit of thrusting out every time he said that word: the index and middle fingers backwards, then just the middle finger. It had become so effortless by now; he probably did it in his sleep when he dreamed of his former days at BASS. And when he mentioned COPS, one of his tattoos become a shaky hand held camera view of a policemen accompanied by a song with lyrics that said, "Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?"

"So we showed you how the bullets that killed our Newsomer almost surely came from a BASS gun," Harris continued. "Her only crime was buying food, giving us this day our Daily Bread, and she ended up like a slimer in Ghostbusters."

More music in the background, this time "Who ya gonna call?"

If the woman who died was indeed one of the squatters, I thought, then buying food was not her only crime…everyone in the Red Tunnel was breaking numerous laws by invading and living on our property.

Harris went on: "So after we exposed this billionth abuse of authority by the Sodamn Insanes who run this city, the next Mercy Killing—meaning they killed another of our angels of mercy—was done by Mack the Knife instead of a gun. And now The Third Man has gone missing, and no body has been discovered yet. We obviously pulled back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz, so they had to change their Modus Operandi to keep us from more proof of what we all know—that these peacers (insert laughter) are trying to silence us one by one. The Silence of the Lambs! Speaking of the Wizard of Oz, again, Cha-Ching!, they're too much like the Cowardly Lion to come in here and face us all like men, so they have to wait until we're Alone in the Dark and act like the Cereal Killers they are. That's all a so-called ‘peacer' is, you know. He's a Psycho Killer, Qu'est que c'est, fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa fa fa…"

I turned it off, though French words in a song were probably easier to understand than his media-speak. But I knew why he did it—he received money from the advertising departments of the big entertainment companies, credited automatically to his accounts every time he made reference to one of the products they produced or distributed. Plus I'm sure he simply enjoyed the fetishistic integration of the popular arts into his life, as all super-geeks did—especially the entertainment of the twentieth century, which to them was "the sacred dawn of modern media," as he had called it.

Now the only window open in my glasses was the one on the top right that showed Reyes' position relative to mine, so I rounded a building and went into a side entrance until the two blips were next to each other. Then I moved my finger on an arm of the glasses until the tracking window closed and the brightness increased, so I could see her better in the dark restaurant. It was closed in the middle of the night, of course, but she had requested access because it afforded the best view of our mark, and of the elaborate monument he was sitting near.

The original version of Vaillancourt Fountain had been completed in 1971, a forty foot high and twice as wide conglomeration of long square concrete tubes that twisted around one another. 30,000 gallons of water were pumped through the tubes from the pool at the bottom, then poured out of their open ends to start the cycle again. The water had been shut off by the city several times to save the high electricity costs, but protests always brought it back until it was finally destroyed by the earthquake. The art value of the fountain had also been highly controversial—some considered it a gross monstrosity and others thought it was unique and daring. Saul Rabin, the founder of BASS and current dictator of the city (also known as "The Mayor"), had been one of its fans, probably because the sculptor was from Quebec, the city his parents had immigrated from. Saul had also proposed to his wife at the fountain, so he had it rebuilt after the quake. And he rebuilt it twice as large and ostentatious, as a symbol that San Francisco was better now than before he came to power.

**********

"Thank you for coming, sir," Reyes said. She was an attractive Salvadoran woman, older than she looked, if the water cooler gossip at the castle was to be believed. "Did you watch Harris's shtick?"

"Yes," I answered. "He blames BASS every time a squatter is killed or goes missing, of course, which happens to criminals all the time without us helping them along. But this time you think he might actually be right, so tell me why."

"The last known sightings of the victims in the first two cases were here in the Embarcadero area," she explained. "One seen by a witness walking out of the Plaza and the other captured on a surveillance camera while waiting to board a ferry in the nearby docks. So I staked out the Plaza and saw this…"

I opened a link that had just appeared in the glasses, and half my view was now a surveillance video that Reyes had recorded with her own pair. This was one reason why net glasses were standard equipment for all peacers, because video recording was so crucial to our work, and external cameras didn't have the infamous blinking problem that went with contact lenses and optic cyberware. "If you blink, you might miss it" had been a very effective advertising slogan for the glasses and goggle companies.

The video showed a thin male figure emerging from inside the Vaillancourt Fountain (the original had three walkways through the tubes, and this new version many more). Then it highlighted a larger male figure following him as he headed toward the water and the famous Ferry Building, a landmark that had also been rebuilt after the quake, its clock tower duplicated but its bayside building now fitted with a parking lot on top and large bays down below for the ferries, which were an important means of transportation and commerce before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges could be repaired. The ugly neon sign facing the bay, which used to say "Port of San Francisco," was now replaced with a permalight one that said "City-State of San Francisco."

The video rewound abruptly, to the frame where the man's figure was the largest, and zoomed in on him. He was wearing one of those solid head pieces that extended down over the eyes to house a pair of net glasses. They were sometimes worn for decorative purposes (somewhat of a fad) but more often to conceal a TMS coil that was marketed as a substitute for drugs. It could be activated to treat depression and other chemical imbalances in the brain, but also for recreational use. The head piece looked like the top of Batman's cowl, but without the ears protruding from the top. The man's clothing was nondescript, but that didn't mean anything, because mine and Reyes' were too. We peacers seldom wore uniforms, because we had high tech ways of recognizing one another, and preferred to intimidate criminals with the idea that we could be within reach at any time.

"I wasn't sure at the time whether he was really following him to the ferry," Reyes continued. "And I was merely watching for patterns, so I didn't tail them. But when I heard that a third squatter was missing, I played a hunch and checked the BASS tunnel maps."

I raised my eyebrows as the video disappeared from my glasses, surprised to hear her report go in this direction.

"I found out that there's a small tributary from the Red Tunnel that stretches to underneath the fountain." My eyebrows rose even further. "It was sealed a long time ago, but I'm thinking that the squatters re-opened it, and have been using it as a secret passage to the city, perhaps especially when they want to ride the ferries without being surveilled." That made sense, because I knew Harris's people were involved in a lot more crime than he ever admitted. Who knows what they were smuggling across the Bay, especially from the ruins of Oakland.

"So that's why you're thinking the killer could be one of us," I said.

"Yes. I suppose some other scenarios are possible, like intra-squatter conflict, but there's only one that seems probable, from motive and opportunity. Three bodies are too many for this to be random or accidental. I think they were executions, and I think he's waiting for the next one."

She nodded toward the figure at the table in the Plaza, which looked a lot like the one in the video, especially when I telescoped the view in my glasses and saw that he was wearing that same kind of head piece. So I decided to trust her instincts long enough to let my mind go down the route she was suggesting, imagining that a peacer was killing defenseless squatters one by one, without authorization. This wouldn't be the first time something like this had happened—there was a fine line between legal and illegal murder when the cops had a license to kill.

"What are you thinking, sir?" Reyes asked, because I had been silent for a while.

"I'm thinking what I would be doing, if I was the killer."

"The different MOs in each case are hard to explain," she said, abbreviating the Latin idiom that Harris had used in his report.

"Maybe he's learning as he goes," I said. Like Harris had suggested.

I thought a little more, then told Reyes that I'd test her theory on my own, because of the delicacy of the matter. I told her to take up a position in another location, because if the killer ran, I thought I knew where he'd run to.

I stepped back outside and walked behind the buildings, out of sight from the perp again, but toward the other side of the fountain. As I did, I called the castle and asked for the best tech available, and soon an older, gray-haired man named Nathan Aaron was on the line.

"Only do what I ask," I said to him. "Not the usual global data searches, and especially not peacer locations." Depending on what happened, I didn't want others to know if the killer turned out to be BASS, and for a number of reasons I didn't want there to be a record of it. And I didn't want to take the time to go through the whole database in my glasses, so I'd have to find out who he was the old fashioned way—by taking him down and questioning him.

I told Aaron, "Scan the Vallaincourt Fountain in the Embarcadero for surveillance devices."

In just a few moments (he was good), the tech informed me that there were camouflaged micro cameras at each of the exits, and one near the center. I asked if he could tell whether it was BASS equipment without seeing to whom it was registered, and he said it didn't matter because it was definitely not BASS equipment. This threw me a bit, but then I realized that a peacer could have simply purchased his own, in order to avoid the kind of confrontation that I was about to have with him.

"Can you hack the cameras without the owner knowing?" I asked. "And give me access too?"

"Are you kidding?" was all he said, and soon there were five tiny screens visible in the left half of my glasses. By now I was standing on the far side of the fountain from the perp, and I had to speak louder and turn up the audio in order to hear the tech above the din of the flowing and falling waters. I told him to loop the camera at the closest entry point, and when he did, I switched my glasses to night vision and walked into the corridor. There was no one else inside the fountain at this late hour, the homeless having been effectively scared away by BASS's zero-tolerance policy, but I knew that during the day many people, especially children, enjoyed the maze-like adventure of viewing the fountain from inside. It was engineered so that you could see the waters from almost anywhere in the walkways, and you certainly could hear them well.

After making a few turns, including a wrong one that ended in a blank wall, and some winding steps downward, I found the camera that was watching the squatters' hidden tunnel entrance. While Aaron had it temporarily looped, I located it on the wall near another dead end. It was a clear strip stuck to the concrete, about the size of a Band-Aid or a stick of gum, and the tech informed me that it was equipped with night vision as well, and a proximity alert. While its owner couldn't see me, I explored the floor near the dead end and discovered the tunnel entrance, its outlines hidden by tiny holo projectors near the corners that looked similar to the camera on the wall, but were even smaller. It would be interesting to find out how they opened it from this side (probably by remote), but that wasn't the reason I was here right now.

I crouched on top of the tunnel entrance, turned my head slightly away from the camera, and told Aaron to release the loop. Then I stood and moved slowly past it, like a squatter emerging from the tunnel. I could almost hear the proximity alert beeping in the killer's ear—assuming Reyes was correct in her theory, and this wasn't just a wild goose chase.

Then I crouched near the end of my little hallway, so I was able to make use of either corner, depending on which way the perp came. I moused the arm of my glasses to arrange the camera feeds, so I could tell which entrance he used. Then I told Aaron to watch the perp, and waited.

The masked man didn't move from his seat in the Plaza, which I expected, because if he was the killer, he would be waiting until someone emerged from the fountain. He would be watching the same camera feeds I had in my glasses, to see which doorway I exited. But he continued to not move for such a long time that I started to think this was a wild goose chase.

Then he stood up and moved toward the fountain.

"Bingo," I said to Aaron, and without explanation told him to unplug and give me some privacy. He did, after telling me which entrance the perp was using, and from which direction he would approach my position. I maximized that camera view at that entrance and watched as the man pulled a handgun while entering the fountain. It looked similar to the two boas I wore on my belt, which were the weapon of choice for many peacers, but I couldn't tell for sure.

Still crouching, I leaned on the corner to the side he would be approaching and placed one of my boas on the floor so that the sight pointed in that direction. Then I accessed the sight wirelessly in my glasses so I could stay behind the corner, but see around it. I switched the other boa from killer rounds to stoppers, and held it ready to fire around the corner.

The gunsight's view was looking down a long corridor that eventually reached another dead end (this was the "basement" of the fountain), but there was an opening in the right side, with steps leading up. I could see the far end of the bottom two steps, and knew this was an ideal setup because the perp would have to step off them when he entered my line of fire, the laws of physics guaranteeing that he would be at least slightly off balance when I fired on him. My idea was to knock him down and perhaps disarm him with a few stopper rounds (they were very good at that), then question him, and if he was a peacer, try to untangle the ethical knots that would present. If he was some other kind of criminal, it would be very simple—arrest him and lock him up in the cathedral that was also on top of Nob Hill, which Saul Rabin had turned into a high-tech jail after the quake. And if the masked man resisted arrest, I would shoot him with the killer rounds in the other boa. (That was the legal kind of murder in our new world order.)

Any notion of simple went out the window when I saw a proximity alert flashing in one of the tiny windows from the other perimeter cameras, and soon realized that a couple of lovers had been strolling by and decided to walk into the fountain. They were heading in our direction and could easily overtake the perp, which would complicate things considerably, so now I knew for sure that I needed to take him down as soon as he arrived, and before the couple could be caught in the fray.

**********

Thankfully he arrived at my position before the couple did. I couldn't hear him coming down the steps because of the sound of the fountain waters, but I could see him plain as day when he stepped off of them into the hallway. That seemed a bit clumsy for a peacer, but he may have not been at the top of his game, especially if he was being medicated. And he certainly wasn't expecting his prey to be expecting him, let alone ready to shoot him.

I extended the boa I was holding around the corner, down low near the sight on the other gun that I was looking through, and fired three times. I could see the unmistakable blur of the stoppers as they each unfolded into a rubbery X shortly after they left the gun. At least one hit the man before he dove back up the stairs, but I could tell right away that he was not incapacitated, and that he might have held on to his weapon. The unsteadiness of my bent wrist and the awkward angle of the gunsight camera were to blame, but I hadn't been ready to risk getting shot myself. Stopper rounds against killers was not a fair fight.

So I wasn't sure what to do at this point, until I heard a scream from around the far corner and up the stairs. The masked man now had the couple as hostages, and the higher ground, so I probably should have let him leave to make sure of my own safety. But my military and police instincts prevailed and I picked up the killer boa, switched it with the other in my right hand, and moved out into the hallway.

I was halfway toward the opening to the steps when I heard the perp's voice from them.

"You must be BASS," he said, "because the squatters would never use stoppers."

"Michael Ares," I said matter-of-factly, and then prepared to move much faster when I reached the next corner. He paused after I said my name, which may have meant he was a peacer, but maybe not, because many of the criminals knew me as well.

"Don't follow or identify me," he said, "because my authorization comes from higher than you. And I know you will not fire again while I'm holding these two."

While he was speaking, because it would be hard for him to shoot and talk at the same time, I dove across the opening with my head pointed up the steps toward him, and rolled out of his sight when I hit the ground on the other side. Then I quickly curled up and crouched near the corner, so I could fire around it again if I needed to.

What I had seen in that brief second of reconnaissance was him standing at the top of the stairs, holding the two women in front of him by their collars, with his gun over the shoulder of the one on his right. My frantic mind flipped through my options, which weren't many, but he made that all moot with his next move. A tiny gas pellet bounced down the stairs, already emitting its gray fumes into the air around it. It landed a few feet from me and stopped spraying, but I had to move back along the wall behind me, toward the dead end, because the gas was slowly expanding in my direction.

"We're leaving," he shouted. "If you want to live, wait till the gas dissipates. Or if you hold your breath and try to run through it, you'd better go the other way, because I'll be dropping more behind me." I thought it unlikely that it was lethal gas, which was very hard to come by, and this stuff looked a lot like the kind that we used to knock out criminals. But I couldn't be sure.

Nevertheless, I stepped quickly away from the gas to the dead end of the hall, drew in a deep breath, then stepped back quickly to the corner. I peered around it, and when I could see that the perp was gone from the top of the stairs, I took off after him. I followed the trail of gas through the twisting corridors until I ran into another dead end. He had thrown a pellet down that hallway to misdirect me. I turned back and became increasingly disoriented in the dark, the gas distorting the night vision in my glasses and perhaps fogging them too. I tore them off, and had to feel my way with the one hand that was encumbered by the glasses, because I was covering my nose with the other one. My lips and teeth started to hurt because I had been clenching them together so tightly.

Finally, though, when it seemed I could hold my breath no longer, I found the exit and shot out into the city air, never more grateful for it. I bent over double and sucked in a fierce breath, and before I could stand up a body came flying into me from behind and bulldozed me to the ground. I had barely gotten the wind into me when it was knocked out of me again, and the tackler clasped me like a wrestler to keep me on the ground.

"What the hell?!" I yelled when I realized it was one of the hostages, and at the same time realized that I was still clutching both guns, despite everything that had just happened. (That was definitely the military background.) I spun around under her and pointed the boas at her head until she stopped struggling and sprawled backwards on the ground.

"What…," I said again.

"He told me to delay you, or else he'd kill my girlfriend," she said, gesturing toward the bay. I looked that way and saw the perp almost to the Ferry Building, dragging the other woman by the arm.

"I don't think he will," I said as I gathered myself, stood up, and tucked the boas back into my belt.

I started to move toward the Ferry Building, slipped the glasses back on, and said "Call 904, Keren Reyes." Immediately a large portion of the glasses depicted Reyes' view. To show me that she had done what I instructed, her eyes were fixed on an imposing barrier that slid into place on the bottom floor exit of the Ferry Building parking garage, to block any cars from leaving. I told her what I wanted her to do now, and watched through her glasses as she jogged to a concealed spot around the corner from the garage's elevator, which led to the roof.

"What happens if he's parked on the ground floor?" she asked.

"If you're right, which I'm thinking more and more that you are, he'll be parked on the roof."

She used the same trick I had done with the sight of one of her guns, but with more efficient results. For when the masked man and his hostage approached the elevator, confirming my educated guess, she stepped out with the other gun and put it to the back of his head. He raised both hands. She took his firearm, then pulled the woman away from him.

"I only want her," she said to him, and followed my instructions by heading out of the garage with the hostage. But she looked back for a while as she moved away, so through her glasses I could see the man shrug in bewilderment and enter the elevator. I turned off her feed and stood on the street outside, situated so that I could watch the roof but also be close enough to the garage exit that I could get there quickly if he tried to drive out and was stopped by the closed barrier.

That proved to be unnecessary, however, because soon I heard a familiar sound from the roof and saw a sleek black car rise into the night sky from its parking place there. It turned away from my position and headed out over the bay.

"Well," I said to nobody. "I guess we know he's a peacer now."

The flying cars, commonly called "aeros," were the sole property of BASS and were used exclusively and only by our agents. The Sabon antigravity technology that powered them had been invented by a Silicon Valley company that was under Saul Rabin's "protection" since the earthquake, so he owned the rights to something the rest of the world wanted, which made him one of its most powerful people. He was also one of the most enigmatic, which I had to admit even though he was my boss and benefactor, and I was wondering if he knew and approved of what the masked man had been doing.

I began walking back to my own aero to find out.

**********

On my way to the car, I called the castle and asked for a different tech, to keep the knowledge of this case spread out. I told this one to scan the BASS database and The Eye (our satellite system) for an aero that was at the Ferry Building a few minutes before and was now somewhere over the bay. She almost immediately found it, and identified the peacer as Malachi Stein (Mal