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In regards to the bounties I collect on bug spirits, I often have very little need to be subtle. I can go in with flamethrowers or guns blazing, kicking in doors and setting things on fire until they die. That’s what’s nice about bug spirits setting up their nests or hives in out-of-the-way places. But there are many occasions where circumstances call for runners to operate with a lot more grace and subtlety than what I usually do for successful extractions, especially in urban settings or in high-security areas. So what happens if a runner team needs to extract someone from a pricey and secure apartment high rise with lots of security? In a way that won’t also bring down the full force of Knight Errant upon their heads when things go sideways?

One potential way to do it is for a runner team to spoof a call going out from the high rise to DocWag-on. They could then pose as a DocWagon team and can pretend to be responding to that emergency call. With appropriate-looking gear, such as uniforms, medkits and a gurney, a team can convince the front desk per-sonnel they are indeed DocWagon medics. When the front desk confirms a call had gone out to DocWagon, the front desk will likely admit the team into the build-ing with no further objections to treat “the patient.”

Once inside, the team would have almost unfettered access to the rest of building and can simply walk up to the right apartment where they can find a way to sur-prise and render their target unconscious without dis-turbing the neighbors. The team could then wheel the now-unconscious target out on their gurney through the front doors as if he was a regular DocWagon patient requiring medical attention. As an added precaution, an extraction team might wish to slap on a counterfeit DocWagon wristband. This trick could easily work or be modified if the team needs to dress up as Knight Errant/

Lone Star cops, corp security, UCAS federal agents, or any other agency that is expected and has the authority to remove people from various properties, willingly or not. Going into a place under the color of authority can make for an easy extraction.

One of the biggest troubles runners have is with the uniforms they are required to wear for their disguise and cover story. The details about the uniforms should be

exactly right to avoid tipping people off. There are fixers out there that specialize in acquiring uniforms for such jobs (usually fenced to them by runners following suc-cessful runs when they picked this stuff up) and selling them to runners. Your fixer may be one of them, or if not, he likely knows someone else who deals in these dis-guises. Get to know one of these fixers because they can do a lot for you. A truly talented disguise fixer will know precisely what gear you will need to sell the disguise (everything from the actual medical bags and kits that DocWagon medics use and carry around with them to the proper, authorized body armor and restraints used by Lone Star officers). They will know which uniforms wear chevrons and how many years of service each chevron depicts. They will understand the rank system that many medical and law enforcement professionals use, and can tell you how many chevrons your uniform needs if you are trying to pull off the look of a Knight Errant Lieutenant (at least three chevrons, BTW). They will be able to tell you how decorations are meant to be worn, and more importantly, in which order. For those that don’t know, Knight Errant officers wear their decora-tions over their badges when they are in their uniforms, but not when they are in their full body armor.

These fixers can also provide authentic badges for you to wear on these uniforms. Many law enforcement agencies and corporations still rely on metal badges as a time-honored tradition, though properly encrypted AROs are more common. Either element—the badge or the ID ARO—cannot be simply duplicated by a fashion spell.

Most people won’t bother copying the badge number.

They have been conditioned by the megacorporations over the years to blindly accept authority in all forms.

So even if the badge was taken off a cop that had been killed in the line of duty, it should be sufficient to give you the time to get the job done (provided you don’t pass an observant cop in the hallway leading to your destination who happens to recognize the number).

Knowing the dress codes for each organization is another essential, which any good fixer who specializes in these disguises will know. Knight Errant, for example, has started a new policy of requiring its beat cops to have cyberware with the synthetic coverings installed.

So, if you’re pretending to be a Knight Errant cop and you have chrome showing, that could be a big tipoff that you aren’t who you say you are. Lone Star requires its cops to cover up all tattoos and body modifications. This is the information the right fixer can give you.

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If you go into a situation dressed as cop, chances are

you’ll need to pretend to be at the location executing a warrant, either a search or an arrest warrant. And when you say that, the people you’re trying to convince will ask to see those documents. These documents can be pretty complicated with lots of legalese, and it’s best if you rely on the services of a high-quality forger to give you

an error-free document to make your cover story work.

Quality forgers can run as much as five hundred nuyen per document and up, depending on the complexity of the document and any security features that have to be duplicated. But that is money well spent if it helps you to get into places successfully. So don’t forget to have these documents with you, lest you end up with egg on your face for overlooking such an important detail.

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DangerSensei

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Doing that may not always work. Some targets have

diplomatic immunity, so law-enforcement corps such as Knight Errant, Lone Star, and government agencies cannot enforce a warrant on the target. And if they happen to reside in a place that has extraterritorial protection, saying you’re going to snag a target with a warrant from outside that particular corporation will obviously be challenged.

Always do your research first on the target if you attempt this sort of extraction. And be sure to make sure such an extraction is even possible.

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^Thorn

If you have your disguises taken care of, the next thing you’ll need is a vehicle. Vehicles, like ambulanc-es, not only help sell a cover story—they also provide convenient transportation for your unwilling target.

Stealing an emergency or official vehicle, especially if it is a patrol cruiser or an ambulance, is not the best way to go. As soon as it is reported stolen, Knight Errant or Lone Star are immediately put on the lookout for it.

And unfortunately, patrol cruisers and ambulances are designed to stick out from the crowd (not to mention the fact that you have to worry about deactivating all the anti-theft and tracking devices that are equipped on such vehicles so that you aren’t found within a few min-utes of the theft). A decker worth their street rep may be able to “borrow” an ambulance or emergency vehicle for a short period of time, but sometimes a job doesn’t give you the luxury of time to be able to hack records to acquire an authentic ambulance or police cruiser. Some-times you need to react immediately to the job at hand.

And even if they have the time, most extraction teams don’t want to go this route because it adds more com-plications. This is why many dedicated extraction teams acquire legal, civilian vehicles that can be converted to look exactly like an ambulance or police cruiser (or other official-looking vehicle). They then acquire the services of a quality rigger who can make needed modifica-tions to the vehicle. In creating the counterfeit vehicle, some riggers will make all the physical customizations and then add chameleon coating to create the perfect paint job for the vehicle. This expensive coating is either programmed to respond to the environment and proj-ect coloration that helps conceal the vehicle, or it can be programmed to display vibrant patterns of the users’

choosing (which is very popular with car enthusiasts),

in-cluding the paint jobs for any number of police cruisers or ambulances.

Other, more old-school riggers scoff at the notion of using chameleon coating and insist on going for the traditional paint job. Not only are some of these riggers afraid that a complicated system like chameleon coating could fail during a critical part of the run, but they feel that it does a half-assed job. Many old-fashioned riggers feel that painting a vehicle is a crucial part of their job (and some feel that it is a form of art on their part) and not something to be left up to spellslingers or comput-er programs. Plus, they argue that chameleon coating is much more traceable than normal automobile paint. I have never seen chameleon coating fail during a run, but I tend to agree with the old-school riggers that chame-leon coating is much more traceable than normal auto-mobile paint, and you could be courting disaster if you’re not careful about how you procure it. Law-enforcement agencies know just how useful chameleon coating can be for the runner community, which is why they keep close tabs on any buyers and sellers they can find.

No matter how you decide to modify your vehicle, you’ll need extensive and lengthy modifications to the chassis, including false panels and welding, emergen-cy light bars, new headlights and bumpers, and so on, to create an exact duplicate of an emergency vehicle.

This takes time and needs to be factored into any plans for an extraction job. The upside of creating a counter-feit vehicle in this way is that if the run is successful, a runner team can simply store this vehicle in a garage or other inconspicuous location so it can be reused in the future. I know extraction teams that have garages filled with counterfeit emergency vehicles, including govern-ment-issued black SUVs, DocWagon and CrashCart am-bulances, Knight Errant and Lone Star patrol cruisers, KE and LS aerial drones, and an array of various corp secu-rity vehicles. Some of the more brazen and experienced extraction teams doctor up counterfeit patrol and coast guard boats, and even full-on helicopters. Of course, those teams are the ones that have been established for years and have perfected their trade. And they are the ones that demand top nuyen for their services.

Before going to your rigger to have a counterfeit emergency vehicle created, you have to be able to bring him the right model of vehicle to work with. Not all emer-gency vehicles use a similar chassis. For example, Lone Star generally likes to use the Chrysler-Nissan Patrol-1 cruiser for their beat cops. Knight Errant likes the Honda 3100, a vehicle produced by their own subsidiary. Now, I suppose you can bring to a rigger a vehicle that looks like a Nissan-Patrol-1 and ask them to make it look like KE’s Honda 3100, but chances are they’ll just laugh at you. Modifying a dissimilar vehicle like that will make it way too easy for bystander to tell that it’s not an official police cruiser. The closer the match you have to the Nis-san-Patrol-1 or the Honda 3100, the better counterfeit vehicle you’ll have. For Lone Star patrol cars, the Chrys-ler-Nissan Journey is a very close match to the law-en-forcement vehicle. With the right paint job and with the right modifications, it will easily pass inspection. For the Honda 3100, the Honda Artemis is the recommended vehicle when creating a duplicate of the KE patrol car.

The two most prominent providers, DocWagon and CrashCart, also use dissimilar chassis for their ambulanc-es. If your team is looking to emulate the DocWagon SRT, the best choice is the GMC Endurance van, while CrashCart utilizes the MuBoNA Rettungswagen. To properly build a CrashCart ambulance, many extraction runners recommend you should use the Saeder-Krupp 21 delivery van. Unfortunately, even though the LT-21 is perhaps the closest model to the Rettungswagen, the LT-21 still has many dissimilarities that requires a fair-ly lengthy amount of modifications to make the disguise work, so you could be waiting up to a couple of days for your rigger to make all the necessary changes.

Some runners prefer going in looking like govern-ment officials, such as the UCAS FBI or members of the CAS DDI (Department of Domestic Investigation).

Government officials still believe in sticking to the tra-ditional mode of transportation for their agents; black SUVs modified with emergency light bars and dash bars.

These vehicles don’t require too many cosmetic mod-ifications to make them look official. The UCAS has a contract with Ares to be supplied with GMC Sidewind-ers for their government agents. These workhorses are readily available on the market and are easy for riggers to modify. CAS government officials tend to use Esprit Industries Watcher SUVs. These vehicles also are readily available on the market and can be easily modified in a couple hours’ time.

Of course, there are other vehicles that are good aids for extraction jobs. If you need to fake someone’s death, you can have your rigger adapt your van to mim-ic a coroner’s van. Give your target a dose of slab, put him or her in a body bag (with hidden oxygen tanks, natch), strap them to a gurney, and walk them out as if they were a corpse. A moving truck can be an excellent choice if you are extracting an entire family. I know one extraction team tagged their target’s house with RFID

tags and AROs that showed them to be selling their house (without the targets’ knowledge of course). They left it tagged like that for a week (only turning it off when the family either returned home or left for the day, when they might inadvertently discover the tags) so that the neighbors would think they were moving somewhere else. Then on the day the runners were going to make their move (no pun intended), they turned all the tags to read as “sold,” and had arranged for their “moving truck” to arrive at the house. The extraction team quietly took down the entire family and packaged them inside a few moving boxes. Since the neighbors all saw the tags suggesting the property was up for sell and now it was showing as having been “sold,” they didn’t think of any-thing being amiss when the runners moved all the furni-ture (and the family) out (including the vehicles). After the run, the runners were ballsy enough to even sell all the nice furniture and the vehicles from the house, mak-ing for a very nice side profit in the process.

Delivery trucks can also be used to gain access to locations and people, although drones are making deliv-ery trucks a rare sight these days. Even armored limou-sines used in affluent neighborhoods could be used to help extract a target. With the right access codes show-ing the armored limousine has extraterritorial rights, not even Knight Errant or Lone Star could touch the limou-sine. If a security checkpoint has been set up looking for the target but you’re in a vehicle identified as belonging to Mitsuhama, chances are you can literally drive right by it without being inspected. Most security person-nel would not even think twice about stopping it due to the sacrosanct rules involving extraterritorial rights being drilled into the rent-a-cops’ heads (and all the headaches that would follow if they should dare to vio-late those sacred rules and end up being in the wrong).

Dump trucks can also help runners. Properly modified, dump trucks can hold entire families (if necessary), and most security personnel would rather allow a garbage truck to pass unhindered instead of going through the trouble of inspecting it and getting their uniforms dirty (unless they have clear cause to suspect a dump truck was used in the extraction job). Garbage trucks come in one of two chassis designs; one that is wide and de-signed for large streets, and another that’s narrow and sleeker, giving the truck a lot more agility and capability to maneuver in tight corners. A commonly used dump truck is the Dodge Ram Industrial.

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One thing that Sticks doesn’t mention is that most riggers

do not have emergency light bars or sirens lying around in their garages. Possessing them is a felony in most jurisdictions that carries a jail sentence of up to two to four years. Most riggers require their clients to provide that gear if they want their vehicles modified with them.

Riggers that keep emergency light bars and sirens in stock keep them safely away from their main garage in case they are ever raided by the cops. So if you buy them from

the rigger, expect a slight delay as they have to retrieve them from wherever they have them stashed.

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^{Rigger X}

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I cannot stress this enough: if you do go in dressed as

medics, DO NOT ALLOW THE DUMB STREET SAMMIES TO DO THE TALKING. If they absolutely have to be there, they should only be there for the heavy lifting. I remember this one horror story very well, when a neighbor asked the dumb sammie who was dressed up as a medic what was wrong with the patient. The sammie answered thusly:

“Well, the patient has a fever of almost 108 degrees [first mistake, use the Celsius scale not the Fahrenheit scale!

Also if you have a patient with a fever of 42 degrees Celsius, you need to be rushing the patient to the hospital before their brain cooks from inside of their body! You don’t have the time to be chit-chatting with bystanders!]

and his right side hurts. We believe he is having problems with his appendix [he actually got that one right, surprisingly enough]. We are taking him to the hospital, he’ll probably be in surgery in a day or two.” No, no, no!

With a temperature that high, the appendix would be close to exploding, so you’d want to operate in an hour or

With a temperature that high, the appendix would be close to exploding, so you’d want to operate in an hour or

In document LA FRANJA D’ARAGÓ (página 88-95)