Super Thieves

Andrew

Of course one of Black Ice's goons put an offer on, whatever it was we stole, almost immediately. Heather didn't have it up for fifteen minutes before she got pinged. It worries me a little honestly, they know somebody was at the museum two nights ago when Black Ice was there. I'm sure somebody saw something and I'm sure they tried to track us. Granted, nobody knows who the Shadow Broker is so for all Black Ice knows the object we took is out of Tokyo.

Still, the fact we haven't headed back to New York yet bothers me. I'd feel much better in a city I know I can navigate well.

"Would you look at that," Heather chuckled as she checked her pager again, "the NSL has also put up an offer. Slightly less than what Black Ice is offering."

"It's unfortunate we can't give it to either of them. How long do you think their offers will hold?" I asked her as I sipped my orange juice.

"As long as we leave it on the market," she replied with a flashy smile. 20 years old and smarter than me in almost every way. I'm glad I tried to kidnap her instead of some other girl, even if that is an awful thing to be happy about. But I'd be dead if it weren't for the Shadow Broker. The whole reason I took mercenary jobs was to pay off some deep debts to bad people, debts that couldn't be paid in cash. After meeting Heather, I gave up on trying to pay them back. Why work off your debt when you can hack their bank accounts, make them file for bankruptcy, and then get them arrested for tax evasion and possession of child pornography. Killing them was always a solid option, she's as good with a gun as she is logging into your life savings. But it's just so much more satisfying watching them rot in an NSL prison.

I never want to end up there myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if Lady Luck and Mother Karma put me right next to one of those oafs in a cell one day. Until that day comes I'll enjoy my life with Heather and Carter. Those two are the kids I could never have. Carter suddenly came rushing out of the bathroom of all places with several sheets of notes fumbling in his hands.

"Some light reading on the toilet?" I laughed.

"I set up in there so you two could sleep," Carter said with an eye roll.

"You could have set up in the Broker room," Heather replied with a smirk and a little wink.

"You'd either kill me or kiss me and I'm not sure which I would prefer," Carter teased, spreading his notes all over the coffee table in the center of the room.

"Rude," Heather simply said as she looked down at the papers.

"Our theory on there being more pieces? Well it's true," Carter said, "I was able to piece together the history from the museum logbooks and some information from their website. We stole a piece to a quantum battery used to power the Nuclear Weapons Base 315 during the first Hero Villain War. It stored highly powerful nuclear weapons created by the NSL as a last resort to end the war."

"You got all of that in one night?" I said in disbelief.

"Not being able to sleep has its perks," Carter chuckled with a small smile.

"Okay so Black Ice is after nuclear weapons, I don't think it's a good thing to have a super villain running freely with something like that," Heather said as she picked the piece of the battery we had stolen.

"Agreed, but why wouldn't the NSL protect these better if they know how dangerous that base is?" I replied.

"I wouldn't be surprised if the NSL wiped any information on the base from their databases. If they deliberately sabotaged history to cover this up, them wiping their databases wouldn't shock me," Carter answered.

"I can hack into their systems from my Broker server and double check," Heather said, "how many other pieces are there of this thing and where are they?"

"The museum referred to the piece as an 'unknown relic'. Black Ice previously attacked two museums, one in Texas and one in Florida. The Florida museum reported a missing unknown relic, so he at least has one," Carter replied as he rifled through his notes, "there are no more than six, but there could be fewer. Other than that, I'm not sure."

Black Ice having access to the weapons base is a terrible thing, but I'm not so sure if it's good to let the NSL have access to it either. Corrupt may be too strong of a word to use but those heroes definitely don't keep their promises. They hire mercenaries for jobs they can't handle all the time, ones that mostly involve killing. You know how they repay us? They try to arrest us for past crimes we've committed as mercs. They have no problem hiring someone to do their own dirty work, but if you killed for a villain or even a random person in the past you can expect a nice life sentence as your payment. It's why I never let Carter or Heather go to make trade offs with them. Either I do it myself or I send a messenger. And I've lost a lot of messengers to those bastards. The quantum battery is better off hidden. Nobody hides anything better than a thief does.

"Well, I had best take our recent grab off the market then. Do you know where we can find another one of these pieces, Carter?" Heather said after she had read over everything Carter set out on the table.

"Jamaica. There's a plane leaving in an hour if we can make it."