Ch. 20 – Sleight of Hand

“Yeesh, what is it this time?” Tony said.

The shop was abuzz with shouting, and then it was quiet.

Someone stomped towards the operating room door, and flung it open, and the angry man burst in, holding a phone in one hand.

“How is he? How is Ah Jun?”

Tony glanced at Theo, before looking back at the angry man. This was the first time the two White Leopard leaders had been in the operating room together. “He’s stable, but still needs to recuperate. Same thing as what I just told you ten minutes ago.”

Theo stood up. “What’s wrong, Alan? What happened?”

The angry man, whose name was apparently Alan, replied. “The boss finally decided he’ll only give us the intel through Ah Jun.”

“So what’s the problem, is the signal not going through?” Theo glanced back towards the patient. “Oh, of course, he’s not wearing his transmitter. Do you have it?”

“I’ve got it. Let’s swap out, I can handle this.”

“We’re finally getting intel from the boss. Shouldn’t we both hear it from Ah Jun together”

“Relax, I’ll call you back in when we’ve got it working.”

“Working? Just put the transmitter on his head and tell the boss to call in.”

“Ah Jun is still sedated, so he can’t talk until they wake him up. He was also shot right in the head. Maybe his mod is broken.”

“Just attach the transmitter then, and see if the boss can get an open connection! Come on, my butt’s on the line too—” Theo said, before lowering his voice. The two of them started muttering near the entrance, and growing more and more aggravated. Alan had just been complaining about his boss, which was probably also Theo’s boss, by the sound of it. Was Theo trying to stick around in the operating room so he could claim credit for watching over the patient? Whatever it was, their mutual boss seemed like a contentious topic.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s going on here?” Tony asked. “Only one of you can be in the operating room at a time. Someone needs to step out. And what’s this about his head injury? Does he have an implant there? You guys should’ve told me!”

“Get out of here, Theo. Listen to the doctor,” Alan said, pushing Theo towards the door. “If it all goes to shit, we’re going to the safe house.”

“No roughhousing!” Tony yelled. “Geez. Derrick, make sure they don’t get anywhere close to the patient, will you?”

“I’m on it.” Derrick went around the operating table and closed in on the two arguing Leopards, who were glaring at each other and nearly butting heads. “Could you guys calm down and could one of you step out into the shop, please?”

Theo turned away abruptly, held his hands up and passed Derrick as he backed away toward the door. He still smelled like cigarette smoke. “Alright, Alan, have it your way. I’ll be right outside, so come get me when Ah Jun has the information. This could be our last chance to take out the Hermanos, and the Boss will be very angry if we fail.”

“As if I didn’t know that,” Alan said, shutting the door as soon as Theo was outside. He waited by the door for a few seconds, and then ran over to crouch by the patient’s bedside, took something out of his pants pocket, and placed it on the side of the patient’s head.

“What are you poking at him for?! Geez, it’s one thing after another with you buffoons.” Tony yelled, following after the man and grabbing his shoulder.

The angry White Leopard shook Tony off, and made a sharp and urgent shushing noise. “My boss needs to give Ah Jun a call.”

Derrick crept over to Tony, who had paused, and was staring at the thing that Alan had taken out of his pants pocket. It was small and circular, a little smaller than the patients ear, and clearly an electronic device. But it was hard to make out any more detail since the man was bent over it, even if Derrick craned his head. Alan was still playing with the device he had placed on the patients head, and moved it around until it sat slightly above and behind the patient’s ear. It stayed in place as he took his hand away, almost as if it had been stuck on with some adhesive, or held in place with a magnet. He then punched in some numbers on his phone and put the phone up to his ear. “Hello, boss? How is it now, can you get a signal?”

“A signal?” Tony asked.

Alan said nothing and just nodded along to the quiet murmur coming from the cell phone, until he finally grinned, and inhaled sharply through his teeth. “Okay, boss, I’ll get it fixed, no problem. I’ll call you when it’s done.” He put the phone back his pocket, and met Tony’s gaze. “We need you to do another job.”

“Ask nicely, and I just might do it,” Tony said, folding his arms.

“We, need you to do another job, please.” Alan forced a grin, which only made him look more disturbing. Sweat streaked down the side of his face, and mixed with the odor of his hair pomade, to form a nauseating stench.

“Okay, what do you want?”

“It’s about Ah Jun again. His mod’s broken, so our boss can’t talk to him. It’s located here, inside his head.” the angry man pointed to the side of Ah Jun’s head.

“Your boss can’t talk to him because his mod’s broken? So he has an implanted receiver that’s not working?”

“Yes!” Alan smacked his own thigh, as if in approval for Tony knowing the answer so quickly. “The receiver broke, from the fight we just came from, it’s gotta be.”

“A receiver . . . Is it a cochlear implant receiver?” Tony bent down to look at the device on the side of the patient’s head. “This is the transmitter, right?” He took it off, and held it up to the light, rotating it in his hand. “And your boss talks to Ah Jun through this transmitter? Not a normal receiver then; those would just pick up sound from the environment. Ah, so it receives a signal from cell towers or Wi-Fi, I’m guessing.” His eyes narrowed as he tapped the device with his finger. “Hm, it feels kinda cheap.”

“Hey don’t touch that!” Alan snatched the device out of Tony’s hand and stuffed it back into his left pants pocket. “Anyway, you get the idea now. I need you to replace his broken implant with a new one.”

Tony sighed. “You want me to cut this man open to replace his implant receiver? Why can’t he just talk to your boss on your phone?”

“The boss is paranoid. His important phone calls are encrypted, and the transmitter is the only thing that can decrypt them.”

“Hm . . .” Tony said. “How do we know the transmitter isn’t the one that’s broken?”

“The transmitter is fine, it’s the receiver that’s broken.”

“But how do you know? If your boss can’t get a signal, that means something on the communication path is broken, and it could be either the transmitter or the receiver.”

“I can’t give you the transmitter if it’s not broken! If I left an outsider touch it for no reason, the boss is gonna kill me!”

“Why are you so sure the transmitter’s not broken? Did you test it? We’ve got a test we can run right here to check that the transmitter is at least receiving and sending signals, even if we can’t decode the audio.”

Alan threw his hands up and turned around. “You IDIOTS, I already told you the transmitter is fine!”

“If the external transmitter is broken, I can just repair it. I’m not cutting the patient open to change out his implant receiver until I’m sure that it’s absolutely necessary.”

Alan slapped his thigh again. “Fine! You guys won’t believe me, so take a look yourself.” He took something out of his left jacket pocket, and then turned back to Tony and motioned for him to hold his hand out. Wait, his left jacket pocket? Didn’t he put it in his pants pocket—

“Good man,” Tony said. He stuck out his hand, and Alan dropped the transmitter into it.

“Go ahead and run your tests until you’re sick of them. Just don’t fucking break it.”

Tony brought the transmitter over to the bench and turned on the lights. “Derrick, can you go find the signal capture device?”

“Sure. It’s still in the shop, right?”

“Yeah, it should be.”

Alan tensed up in the corner of Derrick’s vision as he walked toward the door. “Hurry up! Don’t waste my time,” he yelled. “We’re in a hurry, you got it?”

“Okay, calm down,” Derrick muttered. The signal capture device was probably in one of the cabinets in the shop area. Derrick pushed through the door to the shop, but then caught it just in time to avoid hitting Theo, who winced and stepped out of the way. He was standing right near the entrance, with his arms crossed.

“That was a close one,” Theo said, as he blinked his eyes rapidly, and took a few more steps back.

“Careful where you stand, it’s crowded in here,” Derrick said. It really was crowded, and he would probably have to thread his way through a group of White Leopards who were blocking the path to the cabinets.

“How’s it going with Ah Jun? Did you guys fix his mod yet?” Theo asked.

Giving this sort of man more details would probably only complicate things. “Not yet, we’re doing some tests on the transmitter first.”

Derrick nudged a White Leopard, who was sleeping in front of the cabinet, out of the way, and pulled the crooked doors open. The top of the device peeked out from behind piles of old magazines, which were stacked up so high that Derrick’s arms were burning by the time he had taken them all out of the cabinet.

The device itself was a bulky, rectangular box, with all sorts of ports and buttons on the faces, and a pair of sturdy metal handles to carry it with. There were a few attachments also stored in the cabinet: antennas, adapters, and such, but usually the main device itself and the hand-held scanner were enough to profile a device’s wireless signals.

They had gotten the device at a steep discount from the same retired cop that Tony had bought his gun off of. They were a powerful surveillance tool for the police, with the ability to simulate cell towers, spoof specific wireless access points and mobile devices, extract encryption keys off of compliant devices, and act as an all-around electromagnetic radiation profiler.

Tony had bought it a while ago, before Derrick started working at Hack alley, in order to finish a job for a patient who had recently escaped from slave-labor conditions in a sweatshop that operated in the ruins of old New York City. Using the signal capture device, he was able to find an implanted tracking chip and surgically remove it, before accompanying the patient to the transportation hub in New Shore City so she could take a one-way bus ride out of the state.

“The transmitter’s broken?” Theo asked. He crouched down to look at the signal capture device as Derrick turned it around in his hands, checking for defects.

“Well, we’re not sure yet. Tony wanted to test if it was broken first, before trying the receiver.”

“The receiver?” Theo sounded confused.

“Yes. Sorry, we can explain it to you later. We need to figure this out now so we can plan the safest course for the patient.” The device seemed in as a good a condition as you could hope for at Hack Alley, so Derrick gripped it by the handles and started back towards the operating room. He held the device up on his knee so he could free up a hand to open the door.

“Hold on—,” Theo’s voice came from the shop, as Derrick reentered the operating room and closed the door behind him.

“Okay, I’ve got the signal capture device.”

“Good job, Derrick. Set it down here.” Tony pointed to an open space on the bench.

Derrick set the device down and plugged it in to a power outlet, and various diagnostic lights lit up.

“Okay,” Tony said, “let’s see if we can get a signal.” He plugged the signal capture device into a nearby control panel, and set the transmitter in front of it. He waved the hand-held scanner, a megaphone-looking device, in front of the transmitter, and watched the activity on the monitor. “Well what do you know? It’s definitely sending and receiving signals, although we can’t confirm their contents.”

Alan swiped the transmitter off of the bench and stuffed it back in his left jacket pocket. “Of course it is, that’s what I said! Now hurry up and swap out his receiver.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “Right now?”

“Of course right now! Do you think we’re just waiting around for fun? We need to leave right after you fix his mod.”

“No chance! Not unless we see internal bleeding in the inner ear. He just finished a major vascular surgery! His chances of survival will be cut in half if we do another surgery right away! He needs at least a few more hours of rest and nutrition.”

“We’re running out of time. You’re doing this surgery, NOW!” Alan’s neck veins stood out as he screamed, and his face had grown a dangerous shade of red.

Derrick licked his dry lips. “Well, there’s another solution, I think,” he said. “The transmitter decrypts your boss’s calls, right? If that’s true, then we can capture the decrypted call sent by the transmitter with a spare receiver. And then, uh . . . .”

“Hm,” a grin broke out of Tony’s scowl. “That’s some good thinking, Derrick. Only problem is, we don’t have the specialized equipment to translate the captured electrical signals coming from the receiver’s electrode arrays into audio that we can understand. The signal capture device wasn’t designed to translate audio from cochlear implant receivers, and I can’t rig these tools up in a jiffy, either.” He raised his eyebrows and glanced at Alan. “But if we had a few days for us to search for the equipment, and for the patient here to rest and recover, you could take your boss’s phone call, and we wouldn’t have to cut the man open again.”

“That won’t work!” Alan burst out. “If the boss finds out we were, uh, spying on him from the transmitter, instead of hearing his message from Ah Jun, he’d—” He growled, and shook his head hard. “Forget it. We’ve got NO TIME. I don’t care if it’s risky, do the surgery. My boss doesn’t give a shit about whatever fucking disaster happened tonight. He wants that receiver fixed now, so you better fucking start the surgery.”

“So, you want me to swap out this guys cochlear implant receiver, huh,” Tony said.

“Yes, and I want you to use this one,” Alan said, taking a small plastic container, about the size of a small box of chocolates, out of his suit pocket. “There’s a receiver inside. And give me the damaged receiver after you take it out. It’s White Leopard property, and the boss won’t let any outsiders keep it.”

“You’re just carrying around a receiver in your pocket?” Tony said, mouth agape. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“Ah Jun was planning to get his replaced anyway, he was complaining about the sound being unclear. He had me get one for him, since he wasn’t able to find one on the market. Don’t worry about it, just do the surgery.”

“Does Ah Jun know that you were going to put this in his body?” Tony asked. “We were going to stop keeping him in sedation and wake him up anyways, why don’t we ask him before we start.”

“No! Keep him asleep! I can’t WAIT any longer,” Alan screamed, spittle flying out of his mouth. He pushed the box in Tony’s face. “Just put the damn thing in his head.”

“Get that thing out of my face,” Tony growled. He took the box out of Alan’s hand, before pushing his arm away. Tony opened the plastic latch, and revealed a sterilizer pouch, in which the implant receiver was sealed. “It’s pre-sterilized?” Tony muttered to himself for a bit. “What, were you going to go find a surgeon today?”

“I had it ready, just in case we found a surgeon!" His eyes narrowed. "Normal doctors don’t usually talk back so much. They just do their job, like you should.”

Tony didn’t respond, instead he just kept staring at the implant receiver through the clear plastic side of the pouch. “It’s bigger than normal—” and then he frowned. “So you’re telling me that you need to install this specific implant receiver for him?”

“Yes, now hurry it up! And don’t forget to give me the old receiver, do you understand me?! You need to give me that old receiver!”

Tony pointed a finger at Alan. “I’m responsible for the patient, and he—”

“—I’ll kill him,” Alan whispered.

“What?”

Alan pointed his gun at Ah Jun’s head, and spoke slowly and quietly. “I’ll kill him, and then the both of you too, if you don’t do the surgery. You think I’m playing? We’re White Leopards. We’re always ready to kill if someone gets in the way.”

All three of them were breathing hard.

“Do your friends in the shop know about this?” Derrick asked. “I imagine they wouldn’t be too happy if you killed Ah Jun.”

“They’ll listen to me. When I say you two killed him, they’ll believe me. And if you don’t wanna die, you’ll keep your mouth shut about everything I’ve said.”

“Okay,” Tony said. “If you want me to do that, you need to walk yourself outside the operating room, and wait in the shop with your buddies.”

“I need to stay here and watch over him!”

“We’re doing this my way, or the highway. This operation is asking for trouble, considering he just got out of surgery, and I don’t want you waving your gun around while I’m taking such a big risk.”

Alan spat out his words. “You—that’s—I need to be here to make sure you do the surgery. It’s not just my ass on the line, it’s everyone’s in there,” he said, jabbing a finger at the door to the shop. “We need that intel now.”

“Do you have the slightest idea what this surgery involves?” Tony asked. “You’re no help, and watching me’s not gonna make it go any faster.”

Alan’s brow furrowed as he ground his teeth. “Okay, fine. I’ll leave. But you better put that receiver in, and give the old one back to me. I’m gonna test that thing, after it’s done! And if my boss can’t connect to it, then I’m killing you first.”

He stomped out of the operating room and slammed the door shut.

“This is really fucking weird.” Derrick said. “What are we gonna do? Can the patient really not survive another operation?”

“Fucking weird, indeed.” Tony grunted in agreement. “Derrick, come here.” Tony put the sterilizer pouch containing the cochlear implant receiver that Alan had left them down on a benchtop. He switched the lighting on, and dug around the miscellaneous tools on the shelves until he found a magnifying glass. The lighting flickered on, and after gazing through the glass for a minute, he motioned for Derrick pick up the magnifying glass. “What do you see, my boy?”

“Not sure what I’m looking for . . . .” Nothing in the magnified image stood out. The cochlear implant receiver looked much like the ones that Hack Alley usually handled: small, looking kind of like a stethoscope. Was there some defect in the receiver? Something out of place that was concealed by the glare on the magnifying glass? “Hmm, what’s that? Ah—” There was a small protrusion near the junction of the receiver and the thin electrode arrays that stemmed from it. “That’s not supposed to be there, is it?”

“It’s not, oh boy, it’s not. I recognize the implant’s model: AuralSupport part number A839H-1. But it’s been modified; that component there”—Tony pointed a wavering finger at the minuscule protrusion—“looks exactly like a micro-shaker. I’ve seen them before: torture devices. You stick them in someone’s head, turn it on, and it feels like their brain’s on fire. Extracted one of these for a guy who was complaining about head pain after his crazy ex-girlfriend had paid for him to get a mod installed.”

Derrick leaned in and hushed his voice. After talking to Theo and Alan, it seemed more and more like they each had their own secret plans. “But . . . why? Why’re they doing all this? I thought those White Leopards were trying to save this guy? And did you see when that guy was reaching into his pockets earlier? He put the transmitter into his pants pocket, but he took it out of his jacket! It’s as if he gave us a different one to test for incoming and outgoing signals.”

Tony’s eyes widened, and he glanced at the signal capture device. “Really? Are you sure you saw him do that?”

“Yeah, I’m positive. He was turned around, but he definitely took it out of a different pocket.”

“Goddamit. Can’t trust a gangster even when you’re saving his ass.” Tony sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re infighting or something, who knows with these bozos. But I can’t put this thing in a patient’s head.” He opened a drawer and set the cochlear implant-cum-torture device inside. “Remind me to hide that more carefully later.”

Derrick nodded hesitantly. Tony was going to try and fool Allen. This was a dangerous game. “So, what do you want to do then?”

Tony glanced around the room. “Didn’t you just sterilize those cochlear implant receivers?”

“. . . You want to use one of our receivers instead of his?”

“Yeah. Let’s say he was telling the truth, that ‘Alan’ boy. Maybe it’s just a receiver, and that micro-device is just a dud, or I’m going paranoid. If we use our receiver, it’ll work just fine. He said the decryption happened on the transmitter, anyways."

“But what if it doesn’t work?”

“It should. It will.”