[Thursday June 18th, 2076, ~01:25, Soho, London]
The Elite was a nice ride...for a Jap car. The wife and kids were in the back. Spike always insisted on shotgun, which meant Doc Math was riding bitch. Yeah, he'd protested, but Spike had shown some teeth and that was that.
Al headed up to Oxford Street, following the traffic regs, but just mostly. Rollers'd stop a too-careful driver as quick as they'd stop a reckless one. After a block or so things were calmer - the daughter was awake with a bump on her head and probably a nasty headache. She was sullenly silent, though. It was Missus Math that was sobbing quietly, letting out the stress, while her son did his adolescent best to comfort her.
Whether by their employer or the opposition, obviously they'd been fucked at the meet. This happened on the trid all the time, and so came as no surprise to Al. Confident his companions would be exhausting every possible line of communication with Art and Torrent, with their bullshit antennae dialed up to eleven, he figured he'd try to get some info straight from the horse's mouth.
"Well, reckon I don't know a lot, but I know a little. We was told this was a willing extraction, an' by the way y'all come so easy, I'll take that much fer gospel." He didn't muddy the waters with another suspicion - that he and his people might not be working for whoever the family thought they were willingly going with. Instead, he continued to run down the obvious: "An' I know the place we was supposed ta drop y'all off felt wrong from the git-go an' did indeed turn into an almighty clusterfuck - pardon my French, ladies."
He lit up a filterless Lucky Strike that had appeared out of nowhere, using a big stainless steel Zippo that had done the same. "An' near as I kin gather, now correct me if'n I'm wrong, ya were workin' fer NeoNet. So what I wanna know from you, Perfesser, an' right this damned minute, is exactly who it is ya think yer jumpin' ship to?"
Again, he kept a question to himself: Why were people apparently just as happy for him and his family to be dead as alive?