The Neo-Metropol Heist

5: Edward

A day after visiting Dante at the home, Edward had finally found some direction, and with it, momentum. He returned to the hostel with a sense of purpose, coupled with other, less pleasant emotion.
Finding a public access terminal set into the side of a grubby looking bar, called La Bouteille Vide, a short walk from his hostel down in Midtown, he set to work formulating a plan.
He hadn't been the only one to suffer the sharp end of Sergei Castells' greed, he had taken the brunt of it, but Sergei had dragged others into his web, chewed them up and spat them back out in the pursuit of power.
Now, the man sat on a throne of immense power, looking upon the entire city as his own personal playground with anything could ever want inches from his fingertips, and Edward remained barely a speck of dust in the periphery of his vision.
Surely Castells would have caught wind of Edward's release - that was a given, why he had done nothing to stop it was another matter, however. Was he so self-assured that he thought that he was immune to vengeance?
Edward had more pressing matters to attend to now, however.
According to his searches, the Neo-Metropol was the grandest privately owned gallery in the entire North States. Since coming into Castells' possession, he had made it a personal aim to fill it regularly with the most priceless and impressive artefacts from ancient cultures, a show of his own personal wealth so there was no doubting his reach and power.
Even the building itself was impressive, a sheer column of at least thirty storeys reaching into the sky, a sheet of gunmetal against the ill orange sky, like the reaching arm of a great buried behemoth.
Only the lower levels were open to the public, the majority of the building was off limits to anybody who didn't have Sergei's express consent - Edward couldn't even find blueprints for anything beyond the foyer and reception levels, although that wasn't surprising, Sergei wasn't going to make the plans to his pride and joy easily accessible from some rundown public access terminal.
Bright words began to flash in Edward's head and it took him a few moments to realise that they were actually a warning from the terminal itself, they read 'TIME EXPIRED: PLEASE SCAN CREDIT CHIT TO CONTINUE USE'.
Edward grumbled and began fumbling around for the credit chit in his pocket. He hadn't yet gotten round to checking how much Dan had given him, but was sure he could afford another ten minutes of internet use.
He scanned it again and the interface un-paused, allowing him to continue use. This time, he closed the tabs he had open and instead pulled up the search bar, typing in the words 'Astoria robbery', inviting thousands of results to scatter around his vision.
They ranged from information from the patrol force, a carefully worded published statement from them, skimpy on details and heavy on rhetoric about how they were committed to preventing further occurrences of theft, to even less useful speculation from hobbyist forums.
Edward pulled one up and scrolled through thumbnails of video from people from locations across the North States, he chose one at random, named 'SleuthyJoe', a young man with unkempt hair and an obviously 'trendy' pair of wearable computer glasses, and gestured for the terminal to load it up.
"... I'm telling you guys, this guy was a professional!" The young man exclaimed, staring into the lens of the camera filming him, "he has an MO that's easy to track if you know what you're looking for. He's not working alone either, there's too many variables for one thief to handle."
Edward closed the video clip and swept it to side of the screen, flipping through the carousel to find a reply.
"... Sleuth, the people that pull off heists like this are smart, who's to say there's another guy?" A woman at least in her mid-forties with tightly pulled back greying hair said, "If you ask me, this is one crim with impressive tech knowledge."
Edward shook his head in despair - these workaday citizens were romanticising something that was in all likelihood a simple drop-in-drop-out job by an experienced and intelligent criminal who had done it dozens of times before, using their spare time and the internet to escape their lives.
He found a series of text posts starting with somebody hypothesising that there had been two separate people hitting the same place without realising it, speculating that the main exhibit had been the only thing taken from the west wing of the building whereas the east wing had been basically ransacked.
This actually quite sensible argument was quickly drowned out by a series of posts from several other people going into elaborate detail of why the person was wrong which eventually trailed off into an explicit and insulting statement which question the original poster's parentage.
Edward rolled his eyes and added the internet to his ever-growing list of things that never change.
Breaking his gaze from the interface for a few moments and rubbing his sore eyes, Edward glanced around the street.
The terminal he was using was part of a bank set into the wall, provided for use by those too poor to own one of the personal terminals that Edward had seen advertised on many of the glowing neon boards around the city.
Next to him, a tired looking elderly woman with skin the colour of a milky coffee and with the texture of a dried prune hunched over the screen, an inaudible conversation between her and a younger man whose image was displayed on the interface, slightly discoloured by the bright colours of the 3D display.
The woman had tears in her eyes as the young man explained something in detail. The volume was too low for Edward to hear, and even if it hadn't been the woman was mumbling in a language he didn't understand. Edward looked away as he felt himself staring.
High above, between the black and grey monoliths that surrounded him, jump-cars whizzed past each other against the milky mid-afternoon sky, inches between them.
The street that he was stood on now led into the sunken sector on the south end of the island, a catch-all ghetto for those too poor to live up in the towers and away from the creeping damp.
On the other side of the street, sat on a short staircase leading up to a boarded door, a group of men sat huddled together, taking it in turns to flick a pack of gnarled playing cards into a pile with one side occasionally letting out a muted cheer and scraping up a pile of credits.
Edward watched for a few seconds before turning back towards his terminal, a timer in the top corner had started ticking down from ten minutes, flashing an angry red. Next to him, the elderly woman's terminal pinged and froze, the man who Edward now assumed to be her son stuck with his mouth half open.
The woman sobbed once quietly and shuffled away. The terminal waited expectantly for ten seconds before it realised that she was unlikely to return, shutting itself down and scrubbing the young man's face out with inky black.
Edward plunged his hands back into the colours of the holographic interface of his terminal, scrolling back up the page of the forum he had been searching.
As he scrolled, a single word caught his eye. An innocuous word if scanned by a passing reader with any other agenda, but a word that stood out to Edward: genius.
It was part of a short text post, barely two sentences, but the use of the word 'genius' made it stand out for a reason that Edward didn't fully comprehend himself.
'Genius' was an odd word to find in this context. It was a word that was hardly ever used to describe other people unless that person had done something truly brilliant - scientists, academics, they were geniuses according to every history book ever written.
It was hardly ever used lightly, and definitely not by the majority of people on this forum. Even the people whose posts he'd already read had used the terms 'impressive tech knowledge' and 'professional', nobody had said genius, except for this one random post.
The word genius, however, was often used by the egotists of the world to describe themselves. People who felt so secure in their ability to use it safely. Edward tapped up the post, from a user calling themselves 'SmoothFoxe', and began to read.
'If you ask me, this guy was a genius, he's pulled off the job of the decade and the cops haven't got a clue. The big-wigs in their towers aren't as secure as they think and it's time they knew that, this guy is a hero. -SmoothFoxe'
Edward lingered on the post. Punctuating it at the very end was the smallest of emoticons, a single smiley face, but which Edward recognised immediately as a brag from somebody that was very proud of themselves.
The post itself had been quickly drowned out by people questioning how SmoothFoxe thought that what had been done could be justified, others claiming it was the first step towards anarchy, but Edward couldn't take his eyes off of the original post.
Selecting the username brought up a userpage that was predictably empty, reinforcing Edward's feeling. This was somebody that had set up an account purely to post one thing and disappear again.
It was the longest of longshots, but it was all Edward had to go on. Even the most talented of thieves could succumb to the siren-song of good old-fashioned bragging, even anonymously, only to satiate the need for recognition.
Checking his remaining time, Edward saved the page and brought up the call feature, tapping in details he struggled to remember from the back of his mind. The terminal rang out for a few moments until a face finally appeared in the flickering layers of the interface.
"If it isn't my good friend, the infamous Edward Helten," Dan chuckled, "what can I do for you?"
"You're handy with computers, right?" Edward asked.
Dan nodded, popping something into his mouth and chewing it with a pensive look on his wrinkled features.
"Most things from solitaire to the odd system hack. Why?"
"I'm following a lead," Edward told him, aware that he sounded like a patrol detective and not an old man with little to no knowledge of technology and no idea if what he needed could be done, "I need you to trace a name for me, I'm sending you the details."
There was a brief moment as he sent the link through to Dan, whose eyes narrowed as he began tapping away at his own interface in the dim light of his room. Edward could suddenly smell the disinfectant of the corridors at the home for a moment before it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
"An odd request," Dan said, his voice choppy and distorted by the bad connection, "looks like this has been bounced around a couple of mirror proxies. This guy doesn't want to be found. I can do it, but it'll take a while."
Edward frowned, aware that the timer in the corner of the computer was quickly ticking away. He was suspicious for a moment that the timer was skipping several seconds at a time but pushed the thought to the back of his mind.
"How long?" Edward asked.
"Give me a day," Dan said, it wasn't a request as much as it was a matter-of-fact statement of how long it would take, "and for god's sake, man, get yourself a personal terminal, I gave you enough cash. It'll be more secure, things ain't like the good old days. The internet has ears."
Edward nodded.
"Okay, I'll drop you a line once I've found who this guy is," Dan told him, "and get a shave."
The image dropped out and the timer dropped below ten seconds, flashing an angry red. Edward ignored it and let it time out, walking away.
Above him, a louder than usual transit-jumper rushed over the street, the rattle of its shuddering cargo echoing around the street - Edward wondered what its destination could be for a couple of seconds before it disappeared around a corner, and he began to walk away.