A Curious Tale... 2.

Mr Blake left fifteen minutes later, after reeling out all the property I wasn’t supposed to have under the Unitary Dividend Caste System. He left without any solid evidence against me anyway.
I hopped in the ride and cut a tortuous winding path to my rendezvous with Dante. It was a cute little bistro in the heart of the central business district of Lagos. Dante was waiting for me, her lips pursed and arms akimbo.
“You’re late.” She said. “Again.”
“Yes Dante but it’s not as easy to sweet talk the QSA as it is to get to you.”
“The Queers?! Are you sure you still wanna do tonight?”
“Sure. It was just some sop called Blake.”
“Blake? Not Elijah Blake?”
“No, this one was called Silas.”
“That’s still bad. He’s Elijah’s son. Don’t you remember Elijah Blake, the square that took over from Nuhu Ribadu as head of the International Anti-Corruption Force?”
“Yeah yeah,” I said, trying to be flippant. “Well he didn’t get anything on me. Where are Drake and Jay?”
“Probably on their third bottles by now. Let’s go in.”
Damilola Rafferty Kentebe preferred to be called Drake. He was the strong silent type. Too strong, in my opinion. But silence is good in this game. Jason Johnson Coker had long feminine fingers that could operate a computer in exactly one ninth the time it’d take a regular guy. And Dante knew something about absolutely everything except her real name. She’d shown up amnesiac on my doorstep two years ago and since then had spent all her time learning about anything and everything. She was just Dante though, the only person apart from me I could trust. And she was 5’ 7”, and sexy in that weird way that only girls that aren’t drop dead gorgeous are – not absolutely stunning, but you’d always take a second look.
We headed out for the Bureau of Statistics. There was only ever one guard on duty. Dante got out of the hover car and walked past him. He ogled her and got a sleeping dart in his neck for his trouble. I tend to be surprised at people who use guns. All you get is a murder trial or an attempted murder trial, and since all guns are linked to their owners UDCS accounts, you get caught. You can’t avoid getting caught with a gun, so why use one?
“How long will he be out?” Drake asked.
“Five hours plus a monstrous headache,” I told him.
Drake stripped the guard and donned his uniform. He looked almost respectable. I told him so.
Drake took one end of the building, and I went to the other. That left Dante and Jay free to go into the building. We’d thought out this little fiddle a few weeks ago. Jay said he could crack any code in existence, so we decided to test him. He’d cracked the Unitary Dividend Caste System remotely in an hour and a half, so we thought we’d do a bit of book keeping, or cooking if you’d prefer.
We were all in our final year at Livermore, except Dante, who worked in some kind of lab on the outskirts of town. We’d decided to change the figures in our accounts exactly a week after graduation. We’d be rich, and since we’d all be expected to return to our homelands, our new identities wouldn’t be traced as long as we left this town. Dante would come with me of course.
Jay was in, fiddling with whatever it is them computer people fiddle with, and Dante was making sure he felt secure doing it. She was a great learner; she could take in information faster than it could be dished out. She wasn’t in school, but she was the reason my grades had been holding up so well. So learning martial arts had been no problem at all for her, and she was a champion. So yes, Jay felt secure in the knowledge that Dante could take anything short of a riot squad.