‘So there is,’ I said, and put a line through it. ‘Thanks for warning me.’ He huffily snatched the slip and went off to serve someone nicer.
I flagged a passing waiter, and put my drinks onto his tray. ‘You know the most inconvenient table in the bar?’ I asked. I had to speak loudly, against the music now being generated by a couple of musos in the corner of the room. The waiter nodded glumly. He was small and cowed; much more my type of guy. ‘Take these there. And wait a second.’
I found a scrap of paper in my pocket and scribbled a note to Deck. I stuck it under his glass on the tray, then reached for my wallet, remembering only when it was in my hand that I didn’t have any cash. ‘Tell him I said to give you a big tip,’ I told the troll, and waved him on his way.
This done, I moved away from the bar and slipped into the mass of people. The note to Deck told him to stay put, but keep an eye out. Maybe I was just getting a little dose of pre-handover nerves, but something made me want to keep on the move. I sipped my beer and wandered around, trying to look inconspicuous while at the same time placing myself at one remove from what was going on around me. It was like a flashback to an earlier period in my life—dope deals and danger—and I didn’t like it. Not much, anyway.
Then I saw a guy standing by the other side of the bar. He was mid-twenties, had long hair, a big nose and glasses, and was wearing a ratty red sweatshirt with the legend ‘Programmers do it recursively’. A glass of what looked like Jolt was in his hand, and there was a small suitcase by his feet.
Something told me he might be the one.
I walked slowly over, giving him plenty of time to see me approaching.
‘Hi,’ I said. He was about six inches shorter than me, and aware of it. He nodded, a couple of quick jerks of the head, and turned away from the bar. Out of the corner of his mouth: ‘Are you Hap?’
‘As far as I know. And you are?’
This time he shook his head—nervy tics from side to side. Quat had been right about this guy: he came across like the dictionary definition of the word ‘spooked’.
Melodrama: ‘You don’t need to know.’
‘Right,’ I said, trying not to roll my eyes. ‘You get the money?’
Greed briefly lit up his pinched features. ‘Yes. Er, thank you.’
‘Great. So why don’t you finish your drink while you tell me where you want the case dropped tomorrow morning, and then just walk away.’
‘I can’t do that. I’m going to have to tell you how to operate the machine.’
‘I’m wise in the ways of silicon-based shit—I’ll pick it up.’
Another head shake. ‘Dude, you won’t. I built the thing, and even I have to work it from notes. All of the codes have to be entered manually in real time.’
‘So email me instructions when you get back to your crib.’
‘I don’t trust the Net for this.’
‘Jeez—you and Quat are going to get along just fine.’ I breathed out heavily. ‘Okay, so let’s look at it,’ I said, wanting it over with.
‘Let me take you through the codes first,’ he said, pulling a notebook out of his back pocket. ‘There’s three phases to a transfer. Accepting the dream, coding it for transmission to a specific receiver, and the actual transmission itself. The first stage is a no-brainer—a set of passwords which I’ve written down—the last two are hairy factorial. The transmission code is generated in real time, a random function of the serial numbers of the transmitting and receiving machines. You have to wait until the two machines are synched, then watch out for the match code signal.’
‘Which I see where, exactly? Show me on the machine.’
‘Listen to the sequence first,’ he said. ‘And would you mind, like, keeping your voice down?’
I was starting to get impatient. ‘I’ve paid you a lot of money for this. Show me the fucking machine.’
The hacker held his hands up placatingly. ‘Okay, look: I saw a big empty room out back. Can we go through there?’
I turned on my heel and walked, trying not to lose my temper. Friday and Saturday nights they have big parties at the Café, and through an archway in the rear of the main bar there’s a large area for people to chill out when they’ve had too much fun to stand up convincingly. Before I went through I looked up into the cop corner of the room, hoping Deck would catch a glimpse of me, but there was so much smoke in the air I doubted I was more than a blur to anyone above the second tier.
The room was dark, lit only by electric candles arrayed around the edges and in a pool in the middle of the floor, and empty apart from a couple of guys necking on a sofa. One was young and muscular, the other much older and running to flab. They were far too engrossed in each other to represent a problem. I walked to the opposite corner, sat down. The nerd followed, eyes darting suspiciously across at the lovebirds, then perched on the edge of a sofa at right angles to me.
‘I’m waiting,’ I said.
He dithered for a moment, then hauled the case onto his lap. Angling it so only he and I could see, he flicked the latches. Inside was a jumble of components, motherboard fragments and display units, junction-clipped together by wires of every colour of the rainbow.
‘Jesus H,’ I said.
‘See what I’m saying? It’s not exactly in showroom condition.’
‘But it works?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, nodding vigorously. He glanced over at the door once more, and I finally understood what was really bugging me. I watched him closely as he pulled a mini-keyboard out of the mess of wires, and saw that his hands weren’t shaking. Mixed signals: the super-nervousness didn’t tally with his desire to explain everything in brain-ache detail; a voice that jumped all over the place, but steady hands. Everything about him said he wanted to be somewhere else, like he regarded me as a kind of semi-dangerous wild animal, and yet he wouldn’t just hand the goods over and let me figure it out for myself. He’d got the money—what did he care? It seemed odd. Also, I didn’t like his shirt.
I leaned in close, so we were in a huddle with the rest of the room shut out. ‘All this is written down, right?’ He nodded, started to say something. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Give me the notes.’
‘You won’t be able to work it.’
I reached forward and slammed the case shut, nearly taking off his fingers—then pulled out my gun and rested it in the middle of the hacker’s forehead. His adam’s apple jumped like a salmon going upstream, and his mouth fell open with a dry click. ‘Just give me the fucking notes. I want to be out of here.’
‘You ain’t going nowhere,’ said a voice, and I heard the sound of a safety being flicked off. Someone stuck a gun in the back of my neck. ‘Stand up and throw down your weapon.’
‘And you would be?’ I asked, slowly standing, but keeping my gun right where it was.
‘LAPD,’ said a voice, young, a little shaky. He yanked my left arm behind my back.
The hacker looked relieved. ‘You fuck,’ I said to him. ‘You set me up.’
‘That’s right,’ said another voice, and someone came round to stand in front of me and to the left. The older guy from the necking couple. He was holding up a badge, and looking pretty pleased with himself. ‘Drop the piece,’ he said, favouring me with a strong gust of second-hand alcohol. ‘I want to get back to clinching with Barton here. Got the feeling he kind of liked it.’
‘Fuck you, grandad,’ Barton said, and jammed the gun harder into my neck. ‘Look, just drop the gun, godammit.’
‘Don’t know whether I want to do that,’ I said, pointlessly playing for time. ‘Seems to me that while I’m standing like this, there’s not a great deal you guys can do. Push me around, and the gun could go off. Citizen all over the walls.’
‘Yeah, like we’re going to give a shit,’ Barton snarled, causing the hacker to look nervous again.
I glanced across at the doorway. No way I could make it there before getting shot even if Deck turned up, which it didn’t look like he was going to do. ‘Five thousand d
ollars,’ I said quietly to the older cop. ‘To make this situation go away.’
‘You hear that?’ beer-breath said to his partner, ‘Scumbag’s impugning the morality of the Los Angeles Police Department.’
‘I walk out of here with the case, you get the money. Stranger things have happened.’
‘No way, Thompson.’ A new voice. I turned to see that two more cops had entered the room, and were walking fast towards us. The speaker was tall, grey-haired, distinguished—with a suit that was smart enough to prove he was senior, but not smart enough to say he was on the take.
Lieutenant Travis.
For the next few seconds I couldn’t even speak. Partly I was trying to put it all together, to work out how things could suddenly have got so bad. Mainly I could only watch numbly as the most matter-of-fact section of my mind ticked off all the things that weren’t going to happen in the rest of my life. Sitting outside a bar and drinking a beer; seeing a view other than grey walls; doing anything that wasn’t stupid and brutal and merely a way of whiling away the years until one morning I woke up dead in my cell. All these things fell like rain in front of my inner eye, like they’d just been waiting to be visualized.
Travis stopped a couple of yards away, looked me up and down. He’d aged a little, but not much: mainly just lost a few pounds on his face, had his hair cut a little shorter. He was pretty much how I’d pictured him, in the times when I half-expected him to turn up in whatever town I was bunked in. The strange thing was that last time I’d seen him face to face we’d been heading towards friendship, wary acquaintances from different sides of the law-and-order divide. Operating in different fields, and deciding to live and let live: people who knew how to play the game and let the small things slide. Then I stepped outside that, in a compound bout of stupidity, and every line round his eyes said things were different now.
‘Put the gun down, Hap,’ he said.
I hesitated for a moment, then let my hand drop so that the gun was pointing at the floor. I switched it round in my hand and held it towards him, butt first.
He took it, dropped it into his pocket. ‘I’m arresting you for attempted lease of an illegal memory transferral device, and for the use of said device to caretake recollections of felonious acts.’ Matter-of-fact, with no trace of the triumph he must have been feeling. ‘And feel honoured, because I’m taking a few minutes off a far more important investigation to deal with you.’
‘The first is entrapment, the second you can’t prove.’
‘We’ll prove it,’ he said. ‘I’ll lock you in a room, jack you full of sodium verithal and ask you about every crime ever committed in the history of mankind, back to and possibly including parking offences in the Garden of Eden. Sooner or later I’ll find enough of something to pin on you.’
I understood two things simultaneously: this wasn’t about Ray Hammond, and that after I’d been in that room for two seconds it would be. For a second I thought I starkly understood the concept of honour, knowing that there was no way I’d be prepared to turn Laura Reynolds in, even to cop a plea: then I realized it was just pragmatism. I was going down. There was no point dragging anyone else along for the ride, even if they were the one who was really guilty.
‘Er, can I like, go?’ The hacker said. He stuck his hand up his sweatshirt and pulled out the radio microphone it had been concealing.
‘I wish you would,’ Travis said.
‘And I’m clean now?’
Travis turned to him. ‘In terms of your rap file, yes, assuming I ever find it. In every other meaningful sense you’re a lowlife asshole, and if I ever hear of you putting one toe over any line whatsoever you’ll find yourself squashed like a bug.’
The hacker slid off towards the door, ducking and bobbing, trying not to run. Heading off back to his life between the cracks, saved by cancelling the life of someone he didn’t even know.
Travis took another look at me, something unreadable in his face, and then nodded to Barton, who still had my arm held tight around my back. It was beginning to hurt, but I was confident that was going to be the least of my problems for the foreseeable future. Travis might use drugs and close interrogation, but there were policemen whose interview techniques were more straightforward. Chances were I’d be meeting some of them soon.
‘Cuff him,’ Travis said, and then to me: ‘Hope you got some living done in the last three years, Hap.’
I didn’t get the chance to reply.
At the sound of the explosion our five heads turned towards the doorway at once. The hacker was lying on the ground, a couple of yards from the door, a splash of biology arcing away from his body.
‘Holy fuck,’ Barton squeaked, dropping my arm and going for his gun. From outside I heard screams in the main room, the sound of lots of people running in every direction at once. The cops around me dropped into shooter positions, only Travis having the presence of mind to reach out and grab hold of my other arm.
Four men walked into the room.
They were of identical heights, all wearing the same grey suits and sunglasses. Each carried a pump-action at port arms, and they walked like they had nothing to fear. They stopped five yards into the room, just the other side of the forest of candles. Simultaneously the four guns were dropped to firing position, a muzzle locked solid on every cop. Four 38s pointed back in the opposite directions, their aim a lot more shaky.
Silence, apart from the sound of squealing chaos in the main room. I heard the same thought go through all of the cops’ minds at once, as if it had been said out loud:
If anybody fires, we’re dogmeat.
‘Put the guns down,’ Travis said, his voice admirably steady. If called on to speak, I think any utterance I’d have made would have been so high-pitched only dogs would have heard it. The men shook their heads simultaneously.
‘Give Hap to us,’ the one on the end said, voice so deep it felt like the floor should vibrate.
‘No,’ Travis said, tightening his grip on my arm. ‘Put the guns down. Now.’ Then to me, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Who the fuck are these guys?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, equally quietly.
‘Give Hap to us,’ repeated one of the other men. The voice was exactly the same, the inflection identical. It was like I was so drunk I was seeing not double, but quadruple.
There was a moment of screaming quiet, a stand-off, and then suddenly there was an arm round my neck and a gun at my temple.
‘Put the fucking guns down,’ Barton screamed at the men, his mouth very close to my ear, ‘or I’m going to blow his fucking head off.’
The only answer was the sound of four shells being racked into breaches, and I made my peace with the world.
Eight
There was a beat of silence, and then the lights went out. All of them, all at once. The cops fired first, a ragged clatter of firecracker pops from either side of me. I jacked my elbow back into Barton’s face—simultaneously yanking my arm away from Travis.
Barton tumbled backwards and I threw myself to the ground as the first barrage of answering gunfire came from the other end of the room. I landed heavily, crunching my chin on the floor and knocking most of the air out of my chest, and scrabbled to my hands and knees as shots whined through the air around me. Then I just rolled and scrabbled, trying to get the hell out of the way without being able to see where I was going.
I heard screams from behind me, as at least one cop went down. The others were firing and reloading as quickly as they could, and no-one was paying much attention to me. When I made it to the side of the room I got off my knees: there was just enough light from gun flare for me to see where I wanted to go. The cops were falling back to the very end of the room, diving behind sofas in a vain hope of protection. The men in suits were advancing in a straight line towards them, and I squirmed forward along the wall as inconspicuously as possible, until I was behind them.
While I was on their blind side I moved quickly to the far end, the door jus
t a twenty-yard sprint away. But the gunfire from the handguns was more sporadic now, a couple more of the cops down: I knew that if I ran then the guys in the suits would hear me. Maybe at first they’d wanted me handed over, but right now they didn’t seem to be making any major allowances for my safety.
Not to mention that the rounds fired by the remaining cops would be heading straight in my direction.
I teetered for a moment, locked in position like a sprinter at the start of a race, not knowing what to do. In the end I crept forward until I was over halfway there, but did it too slow. Two of the shooters turned and saw me. I froze, barely three running strides from temporary safety: looked at another way, a million miles.
And then somebody ran into the room from the bar, already spraying fire from a semi-automatic. It was too dark to see their face, but I knew it had to be Deck, bless him. He found me immediately, grabbed me by the neck and swung me towards the door without saying a word. I didn’t need a second invitation. I ran like hell.
It felt like an hour since the hacker had been shot, but it could only have been a couple of minutes, and the Café was in utter chaos—a mêlée of shadows scared out of their minds by the sound of the gun battle. Men and women were trying to clamber down from the terraces, scrabbling over each other, falling and fighting. I felt a fraction safer when I was in the middle of the bodies, but found myself being carried towards the outer door. I tried to resist, knowing that I had to try find Laura, and then go back and help Deck, but the pressure of other people’s fear was too strong. Wipe pans of wide eyes, open mouths, hair—and an endless shout of terror from all around me, seeming to get louder and louder until it was almost tangible, something else pushing me forward. It was as much as I could do to keep myself upright and avoid being trampled to death.
I couldn’t even turn my head until the crowd burped out of the Café and onto the street: half the people falling, the rest running straight over them as they obeyed a deep instinctual need to be on the East Coast for a while. I stayed on my feet—just—and got far enough from the door to turn around. The doorway looked like everybody had been told the devil was turning a blind eye and if they could get out of hell in the next five minutes they’d go free.
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