Internet cafes are a dying phenomenon. When the internet was new and connections were expensive they flourished, but once prices of connections and the equipment fell into the range where they were cheaper than television sets it wasn't long before just about every home had one and the only people that needed internet cafes were visitors from overseas with a desperate need to check their emails. Now even they had Blackberrys and laptops with mobile or wireless broadband for that with hotels providing web services as part of the room deals.
As such the internet cafes that sprang up in the latter part of the last century were closing down faster than the record stores that you could have found on every high street in the nineties, but nowhere in the noughties. MP3 had killed record stores that had been trading profitably for decades, and cheap internet access was killing off the last of the web cafes. But they were not all gone yet. Gotham City, being a major metropolitan hub, still had a few and I had pinpointed several in the Gotham Gazette that I had read earlier in the day. These days they had private booths that perverts used to browse child pornography without having to worry about IP addresses being traced back to them. Cybercriminals also used them extensively rather than risking backtraces that would see law enforcement agents who were becoming more adept at internet crimebusting running up against dead ends.
The trouble was that I couldn't exactly wander into a brightly lit shop dressed as I was - still in Arkham grey pyjamas hidden under bloodstained black combat gear. Sure it wasn't the maximum security red overalls usually associated with Arkham escapees, but it wasn't exactly inconspicuous attire. If I walked into a cafe looking like this the proprietor wouldn't think twice about picking up the phone and dialling 911. After a dry day like today, though, it didn't take long to find a washing line with jeans and sweaters that hadn't been gathered in before nightfall - just a quick walk around the back gardens of a quiet suburb - and I was fortunate enough to find a black hooded sweater that was large enough on my frame that when I put the hood up my face was pretty much in shadow.
It wasn't exactly dry, but it was close enough and I put the stolen sweater and jeans on over my pyjamas anyway so that the damp didn't abrade my skin. With the stolen eighty bucks and packing a loaded revolver I stood outside the PCafe Internet Cafe studying the tariff taped to the window as the skies opened up above me and sent the rain pouring down. Ten dollars an hour, or twenty-five bucks for a private booth, plus reasonable prices on coffee and snacks. My stomach purred in anticipation.
I pushed open the door and laid a twenty down on the counter for an hour of surf time, a black coffee, a ham sandwich and some chocolate cake, trying not to look at the smiling assistant, a skinny woman in her late twenties with long black hair. She peered at me suspiciously as I made my order and I glanced about the room as I spoke in an attempt to keep my features hidden from sight, then she gave me a token to put into a box alongside each computer that activated a timer that in turn switched on the monitor - a crude but effective technical solution. It looked like I had the place to myself. I was refamiliarising myself with surfing the internet when the coffee and food arrived. I didn't look up to thank the woman, just kept focused on the screen with the hood of my sweater still up, keeping my face mostly hidden from view. When she had gone back to the front desk I tore open all three sachets of sugar that she had left and poured them into the coffee before sipping at the scalding liquid carefully. The sandwich lived for a grand total of eight seconds while the mouthwatering aroma of the chocolate cake filled my nostrils. Later, I promised myself, setting aside the cake as a productivity reward. Now it was time to get down to work.
Basic Google searches pulled up the news services, and I read about my escape from Arkham on a couple of sites. Eleven killings they credited me with, I noted - nine guards and the two crew of a helicopter that had apparently been collecting an injured inmate for medevac to an emergency room at a more conventional hospital. That was bullshit. The cover-up had already begun, it seemed. There was no mention of guard towers being chewed up by machine gun fire from the gunship that had picked me up thinking that I was the escaping assassin. They gave no name, had released no photographs of me, just stated that an armed and dangerous inmate had managed to escape and that the public should remain vigilant and report anything out of the ordinary to the police. There was no mention of the van driver, but I was fairly certain that the pilot had been alive when I had left him slumped over his stick. Perhaps whoever had orchestrated my assassination attempt had subsequently assured his silence with a knife across the pilot's throat but I set that aside for the moment. The important part was that there were no images of me linked to the news reports of the escape, probably because the last thing they wanted was for the Russians to find out that I had broken free.
Somewhere on the internet was a zip file containing my entire toolcase of hacking utilities, but for the life of me I could not remember where I had left it. It was quite possibly lost forever and I would have to start again from scratch with basic hacking scripts that could be download from numerous hacker forums on the internet, but I couldn't do that here without administrator rights to the operating system that they would not allow me, and most servers that I intended to target had adequate defences against those anyway. Those scripts were for kiddy hackers and learners and of limited usefulness against secure servers. This was not yet a hacking or remote database intrusion task, however. Tonight was just a low level information gathering exercise. The skills that I needed to learn quickly could be picked up over the internet relatively easily - skills like breaking and entering, disabling or bypassing burglar alarms, picking locks, stealing cars and motorbikes, Vulcan death grips and all the other stuff that a fugitive on the run needs to know in order to survive from day to day.
Obtaining a laptop and sorting myself out a web connection could be done easily when I had the money, but without being able to search for a legitimate job the only way I could get that money and get on with my life was by illegal means. Carjacking and mugging was straightforward but yielded low rewards that made those crimes unfeasible. I needed to move into something bigger and more lucrative, which obviously meant exposing myself to a greater risk of discovery and capture, but what choice did I have? I had a mission to complete and sitting on my ass on a pile of newspapers watching kids do half-assed stunts on their BMX bikes through peepholes in whitewashed windows was no way to accomplish that. Obviously there was no way I was going to be able to steal an Ohio class SSBN out of Pearl Harbour and launch armageddon against the Russians and Chinese, but there were other ways of winning the end-game that while not quite as efficient and in your face as global thermonuclear war could be equally cataclysmic.
Merely orchestrating a total breakdown of social and economic order in the United States would have global knock on effects that might end up serving me adequately, I figured. That was a long and winding road rather than the arrow straight to the heart that a nuclear attack constituted, but ultimately they both ended up at the same destination. Averting tipping point was all that mattered.
I wondered how long the scientists reckoned I had before it was too late and asked Jeeves. The answer came back as seven years - 2016 was the earliest accepted prediction. Cool. I returned to the more immediate issues and devoured the chocolate cake in no more than seven seconds.
There was nothing on the internet about my primary target other than a facebook page that I was unable to browse even after setting myself up an account under a made up name. I put in a request that she add me as a friend, but after my hour had expired nothing came back. Either I was being ignored or she wasn't online. Probably the latter. She'd get a blast out of the name I'd chosen and if she had any sense would have added me straight away if for no other reason than to be able to track me down online by setting GCPD's cyber-squad on my ass. I got back down to researching my tasks, taking mental notes from websites as disparate as 'how-it-works' and 'rotteneggs' as I learned how to do basic illegal acts with maximum effect for minimum risk. Tricks of the trade, techniques and methods, even advice on selecting low risk targets. It was all there on the internet. They say that the best place to learn how to be a criminal is in prison, but that only held true before the internet took hold. In prison you only learned from people that had been dumb enough to get caught, but on free to access websites were the lessons learned from those that had successfully evaded conviction their entire lives, and you didn't have to bend over and take it up the ass to pick up those hints and tips, either, and that's always a bonus.
I watched the assistant amble over in my direction and seeing as I was the only one in the place I braced myself for a confrontation. I glanced at the meter on the desktop, noting that I had just five minutes left before it timed out and the screen died. "Closing in thirty minutes." She called over the partition, looking directly into my face as I acknowledged her with a nod. Well, if there were no pictures of me and no descriptions mentioning my scarring on the newscasts I figured I could take a chance and relax a little. I pulled another twenty out of a pocket and asked her for some more coffee, a cheese sandwich, another slice of that scrumptious chocolate cake and one more hour of web time. She wavered as I flipped back my hood and put on my puppy dog eyes, that wounded, pleading look that worked so well on Harleen. Her eyes went wide as I revealed my permanently smiling visage to her and the imploring look was thus ignored.
