Security Leak

20:00, 3.14 weeks since the showdown with the Wrecking Crew.

Ditch returned home from getting breakfast. In the hall outside his Redmond Barrens low-rent apartment, he found Kyra, his little sister in all but blood, is waiting for him. Inside, while raiding his fridge, the thirteen-year-old claimed this was nothing more than a social call, but Ditch suspected she has something troubling on her mind—trouble with foster-parents, maybe? The fridge yielding less than optimal results, she convinced Ditch to take her to get something to eat; at a nearby Stuffer Shack, he finally coaxed the truth out of her—she needed to borrow ¥2000 to bail her boyfriend out of some trouble. Mid-intervention, the phone rings: Claudia calling about a job. Ditch agreed to meet at the specified bar downtown—always a different place—and to get in contact with Mr. M and Bookworm on her behalf. Time to go to work; the intervention would have to wait. Ditch took Kyra back to the apartment and gave her the money—he had plenty, so it was no bother to him—but knowing the Street as he did, he knew better than to think the money would wipe away the problems by itself; he tried to explain that it was the boyfriend’s responsibility to pay back the loan, and not hers, but parenting/mentoring not being a skill anywhere near his résumé, she took it the wrong way. He offered to drop her off somewhere, but she refused, opting instead to walk home in the rain. Disappointed but resigned, he got back to work calling up the other DXM members. He managed to get hold of Bookworm and M, before gearing up and heading downtown to the meeting.

As usual, Bookworm was about to head out clubbing with his bad-influence buddy, Wallace, when he got Ditch’s call, but dropped his plans for work’s sake; Wallace was annoyed at the interruption. As usual, Mr. M was surfing the matrix at the time Ditch texted him, and had simply missed Claudia’s earlier call; he agreed to the meeting as well. Vapor had spoken to Claudia already, and was unavailable on other business—still mentally recovering from his near-death at the business-end of a minigun, he had expressed the possibility of his early retirement from shadowrunning.

Claudia awaited the Team in the upper level of the open-air bar, along with two others she had brought aboard for the operation: Ivory, and Paladin. Acquaintances were made; Bookworm immediately sidled up to Ivory, despite her obvious lack of interest. At Claudia’s request, Ditch shooed away nearby, uninvolved patrons. Then she briefed the team on the particulars of the mission: a subsidiary of Renraku tasked with development of an experimental sensie AI, called “Cecilia,” had suffered a leak of their alpha material, which was already hitting the underground BTL market; they needed all copies of the alpha recovered before it could spread. Their only lead was an AWOL employee from the development team, one John Cho, whose rather-light dossier Claudia downloaded to the team’s commlinks—bringing in Cho was a secondary objective. The deadline was ASAP, and as usual, discretion would be a necessity. Claudia produced a BTL chip, a copy of “Cecilia,” which she offered to Ivory for examination; Ivory jacked in, finding herself on a deserted beach with a beautiful woman—Ivory’s expression alone upon being disconnected revealed the developers’ success. Claudia informed the team that she would be attempting to get “as much as possible” in payment, with her usual 10% cut. The DXM team members had a long-standing trust-relationship with Claudia, and agreed to the terms without condition, as did the two additional runners.

As Claudia left the team to their work, they split into two groups: Mr. M stayed at the bar to do some internet research on Cho, with Paladin remaining to provide security; Bookworm and Ivory went to the only known source of distribution of the “Cecilia” BTLs, an alley behind a downtown club, with Ditch providing security.

Bookworm, Ivory and Ditch arrived at the alley, but found no one of interest there. They entered the adjoining club to start canvassing the patrons there for a source of the BTL; Bookworm and Ditch found a guy who said he had some for sale. When Bookworm inquired about his source (to prove they weren’t faked), he balked and started to distance himself; Ditch made a grab for the man, but he slipped away, just before Ivory slipped in behind him and tripped him up. Again, the dealer refused to give up his source, and again he tried to run; this time, Ditch chased him down and put him in an arm lock, forcing him back to the group. As they spotted the approach of the club’s bouncers, Ivory quickly hinted that they were cops, and that the dealer might end up in jail if he didn’t cooperate, but he demanded to see identification they didn’t actually have. Bookworm, in his natural environment at the club and knowing how these things work, convinced the bouncers that their “friend” had exceeded his limits, and they were taking him home; the bouncers allowed them to leave, escorting them all out the front door.

Outside the club, the still arm-locked dealer was led past the queue of potential club-entrants, around the corner into the alley, where they resumed their interrogation. They had the dealer pretty well confused and scared-for-his-life when Bookworm offered to buy the chips he had in exchange for the info about his source, to which the dealer (either reluctantly or unintentionally) agreed. Bookworm had ¥1250 on his person, which the dealer agreed to accept for three of the chips (he had six), and said his source went by the moniker, “Ghoul,” though he had overheard him being referred to by the name “Travis.”

Meanwhile, back at the bar…

Mr. M spent a while digging through the internet, but only managed to find a sparsely-populated, rarely-visited social media profile for John Cho, which M failed to hack into. He did manage to find an address, though.

The two took Mr. M’s ride to Cho’s well-to-do corporate apartment. Rather than bother with the gate-guard, they found a side-door, and M bypassed the electronic security to allow them to enter. Inside the apartment complex, they decided to nevermind the CCTV cameras and just walk up to the apartment like they belonged. Of course, the apartment was locked; M lacked the tools to bypass the non-electronic lock, so Paladin applied his boot instead. Inside, the two found the usual salaryman’s accoutrements, but no immediate sign of its occupant. Mr. M immediately spotted Cho’s computer and set about mining it for info. Again, he found himself looking at Cho’s social media profile, but this time it was auto-logged-in, so he had full access; it was still pretty sparse, but one noteworthy detail was a photo of Cho tagged by a friend/acquaintance—interesting, as Cho’s appearance in that photo was quite different from the one in his company dossier. It appeared to have been taken in some sort of nightclub; M sent the image to Bookworm, who was able to identify the club as “Synapse.”