Free Remote Control by Jack Heath Page A

brother who’d go with you,” King said. “I assume he did some stunt that proved he was superhuman?”
    Six remembered Kyntak jumping off the wall into the hold of the helicopter. “Yeah, he did.”
    “Okay.” King rubbed his eyes. “I’ll call Queen, get her to dig into the reserves and scrape together a hundred million credits.”
    “What?” Six stared at King. “You’re going to pay up?”
    “We may have to. Otherwise—”
    “No.” Six sprang up and started pacing around the room. “We can examine the video, search through the usual suspects, and see what leads we can dig up. They obviously planned this a long time in advance, so there’ll be a reason they picked 452ndStreet as the drop-off point. If I go there, I’m bound to work out something. They may already have stakeouts, and I could grab them.” He stopped walking and glared at King. “They’re not going to get away with this.”
    King was silent for a few seconds. “What’s more important to you, Six? Bringing them to justice or getting Kyntak back?”
    “Getting Kyntak back,” Six said without hesitation. “But even if we pay, there’s no guarantee that—”
    King cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I know. The money is there because we may need to give it to them and take it back later. But we won’t let them keep it.” He hit print and the bank account details scrolled out of the printer. “I just wanted to check you were still on my side.”
    “Always,” Six said.
    “Good. Call Ace of Diamonds. Let’s see what we can get off this video.”
    By 15:30, they didn’t know much more. They’d watched the recording dozens of times. Seeing Kyntak’s bruised face again and again made Six feel cold in his stomach.
    The brick wall behind the woman was moderately weathered clay, held together with quicklime mortar. There were millions like it in the City. That was probably why it had been chosen.
    Ace said the chair Kyntak was sitting in looked like pure lead, and it had been soldered together rather than screwed. He was chained to it despite the fact that he was clearly unconscious when he was filmed. A bad sign , Six thought. They’re being over-cautious; therefore, they know what we’re capable of.
    Kyntak’s Deck fatigues had been removed—he was wearing a bright orange undershirt and shorts. That seemed unusual, but it didn’t get them anywhere.
    But they had learned one thing. When they zoomed right in, they saw that Kyntak’s jugular vein pulsed with a steady rhythm. He was alive.
    Six ground his teeth together. “We have three and a half hours,” he said. “And we know nothing.”
    “The soldiers from the apartment building should be back any minute now,” King said. “We’ll learn plenty from them.”
    That was their best shot, Six knew. But his subconscious screamed out for action. He was wasting precious seconds waiting. There must be something he could do, instead of just standing still in front of a screen…
    “Cut to the end,” he said suddenly. “Where she leans forward.”
    Ace clicked, and the picture shifted. The woman was leaning over Kyntak, hands on his shoulders. Her face was closer to the light, but still too dark to identify.
    “Now take a snapshot,” Six said. He didn’t need to elaborate. Ace was already fiddling with the brightness/contrast and hue/saturation settings. She clicked process.
    And suddenly the woman’s face was clear, staring at them out of the screen. Narrow lips, a nose that had once been broken, and fishlike crimson eyes. Black hair framed a narrow face.
    Red eyes? Six thought. Could be contacts, surgery, gene therapy—or just computer graphics. But not an accident.
    “Can we check her facial focal points against our database?” King asked Ace. “And hack into the ChaoSonic one if we don’t have a match?”
    “Sorry,” Ace said. “The picture is stretched—that’s why her face looks so narrow—and I don’t know what ratio was used. That’ll mess up the