The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller

by Pierre Ouellette

  Of course, the banks and the government had not anticipated the Bird, an economic genius in the rough. Every payday, his people marched the wage earners to the bank booths, where they deposited the contents of their debit cards into a maze of accounts maintained by the Bird’s bean counters. In exchange, they were given crow money, negotiable everywhere inside the Bird’s turf. The Bird held the equivalent of hard currency, while his flock dealt in the soft coin of the immediate realm. The local merchants exchanged crow money through the Bank of Bird to obtain legitimate funds for outside purchases. The Bird took a simple transaction fee for every bill exchanged.

  You didn’t have to be an economist to understand that the Bird and his peers in other cities were now a force of considerable weight in the local business system. But they were equally difficult to bring to justice. By now, there were several ugly cases to prove the point. One was in St. Louis, where a police operation to arrest a local boss resulted in a full-scale urban battle that killed twenty-seven police officers and forty civilians—all with no arrest.

  Here in Portland, the Middle East holds maybe a third of the urban population, but exactly how many is no longer known. And in the long hours of the night, the Middle East leaks into the rest of the city, and the weapons pop and the sirens wail. Everyone who can afford it now resides in one of numerous secured compounds surrounded by razor wire, armed guards, dog patrols, motion sensors, and neural-driven video surveillance.

  To present the political illusion of positive action, the police have adopted a strategy of hit-and-run harassment. If they couldn’t shut the Bird down, they could at least keep him off balance. That’s where Lane comes in.

  The solo crazies writhe like vertical snakes to the call of the junk crew as Lane crosses the floor with the beer and the pipe. In the booth, the girl bobs her head in synchrony with the elusive 7/4 meter, and her palms catch the accents as they descend on the table. Truth is, she looks pretty damned good. Skin smooth and taut, hair thick and shiny. She is in the peak of bloom, and determined to grab what she can before the petals close forever.

  Lane sighs inwardly as he sits down. Beyond the immediate call of the girl’s flesh, he knows another force is at work: the raw, unfettered attraction of her youth itself. At forty-six years of age, he can see that quality clearly, much more so than he could in his own youth, when everyone’s age was a given, not a treasure.

  She pulls a lighter out of her purse as he pushes the pipe across. The ocher color of the hashish in the bowl tells him it is probably from one of the new Mongolian sources. Lane takes a sip of his beer and watches the girl apply the lighter to the pipe, a lighter designed specifically for this kind of operation. As she pushes a button on the top, a horizontal jet of flame ignites the drug while she sucks greedily to get the best possible hit. Her bosom swells to maximum circumference as she puts the pipe down and holds the smoke in the laboratory of her lungs, where the compounds quickly dissolve into her bloodstream and are pumped posthaste into her brain. When she exhales, he sees her sinuous arms unfold into a smooth plane as the tension dissipates before the onslaught of the psychoactive molecules.

  She stares at him dreamily through a crooked smile. “You’re cute. Did you know that?”

  In fact, Lane no longer knows that, but this is hardly a time for self-exploration. “So what you gonna do with the card bucks?” he asks.

  She focused into the far distance over his shoulder. “I got plans. Yeah, I got plans.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  He can see her arms begin to knot up again. He’s pushed a little too far.

  “Just plans. That’s all.”

  He knows her plans, of course. Get behind a gate. Get some nice clothes. Get some fine food and fast drugs. Get plugged into the Feed. It’s always the same. But it won’t happen. She’ll blow the money and be back blowing the trade in no time at all.

  As he watches her, he feels himself locked in a nasty little internal cycle. She’s a victim of circumstance, a microscopic effect driven by a macroscopic cause. He should feel her pain, but doesn’t. His years on the street have built up a powerful immune response to this kind of thing, a protective barrier against personal devastation. Yet he hates his vacant heart, his lack of compassion. And on it goes. The only way out is to focus on the job, on the mission.

  “Shall we go?” he asks gently.

  She looks at him suspiciously. “Let’s see the card.”

  He scans the windowless room, a professional precaution. The junk crew blasts on and the crazies gyrate in their singular spaces. The other booths are mostly empty at this time of early evening. At the tables in the back, the Oldies play cards. Looks okay, so he gets out his wallet, keeping it below the tabletop as he pulls out the card and shows the girl. The holographic logo sucks in the dim light and flings it out in a strange braided pattern. She seems satisfied.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  He takes a last sip of beer and watches her rise. Her hips and thighs move gracefully against the tight restraint of fabric worn to the point of gloss. He feels a distant longing, but finds it easy to squelch. Far too easy to squelch.

  They ascend the stairs and walk out onto Foster, where the inverted heat of early fall fills the street. The trolley rumbles past on its way toward the river, and the scooters dart around it like small fish around a whale. The heat carries the smell of the rice carts and the green stink of cooked cabbage. The Bad Boys are clustered on the corners, feeding off the strength of the pack, but they don’t bother Lane. The Bird is the law here, and the Bird says the Bad Boys will not hinder commerce. They merely posture and drink the fuel of fear they get from the frightened stares of the Oldies.

  When they reach the end of the block, they turn off Foster and onto a side street, into the neighborhood, where dilapidated bungalows dwell under the skimpy shade of defoliated trees.

  “Sabrina! Darlin’! Don’t leave now! Don’t leave me ’lone! What you say, bitch?”

  The voice comes from behind them, an affected whine laced with amphetamines. The girl beside Lane winces. Lane turns to look and sees one of the Bad Boys broken out of the pack and starting their way, skinny hands jammed deeply in the pockets of his car coat. Has to be her pimp. Lane doesn’t like it, but stays cool. Most likely, the punk thinks Lane is a john and is reminding his whore that she’d better settle up with him later. He plays the part, shrinking in fear and quickening his pace. He checks a half block later, and the Bad Boy is merged back into the pack.

  “So, it’s Sabrina is it?”

  “Yeah, it’s Sabrina.”

  “You know, there was a movie called that one time. They even made it twice.”

  “Oh yeah?” The girl seems mildly interested, but not enough to look at him. No matter. He’s just filling in the spaces until the job is done.

  They walk past an old Plymouth minivan. Curtains line the windows, and a woodstove chimney pokes through the roof. It’s a curber, pockmarked with rust and settled permanently on flat tires. They populate the curbs for miles in any direction, neighborhoods within neighborhoods, too numerous to tow, too critical as housing to be destroyed. The majority of them are fat, beefy vehicles that carry nomenclatures from an age gone by: Suburban, Explorer, Tahoe, Pathfinder. A time of great economic delusion, when the media regarded the “oil crisis” as a bad dream that had long since passed. In reality, the world began to terminally drain the global oil drum shortly thereafter, when it was discovered that the planet’s “known reserves” had been relentlessly inflated for various political and economic reasons. Suddenly, the rate of petroleum consumption surged past that of production, and prices began a rapid upward spiral, triggering a calamitous series of economic events that eventually spawned the vast population of curbers now lining the world’s streets.

  They walk a few more blocks past weed-choked yards and dying houses. Big sheets of weathered plywood cover picture windows. Porches rot and sag. Garbage and rusting appliances fill front yards. Makeshift chimneys p
oke through dilapidated roofs. Lane takes it all in with a wry grin. The real estate people over here still speak of the “imminent housing recovery.”

  “You want to go over the plan once more?” Lane asks.

  “Nope.” The girl is still sailing on yellow dream, but she has her wits about her. It’s a good combination. She’ll go through the routine without arousing too much suspicion.

  Lane and Sabrina round the corner back onto Foster and come to a deserted storefront with soaped windows. “This is it,” Sabrina announces. The door is unlocked, and they walk into an open space with a warped wooden floor populated with the posts and ropes of a queuing system, which is now empty. At the end of the maze, a steel-lined doorway leads down a short hall bathed in feeble white light from the overheads. As they duck under the ropes to shortcut through the maze, Lane hears a mechanical thumping coming from the floor above and smells the pungent solvents and inks of a printing plant.

  He’s hit it. He’s found the bank, where debit card balances turn into crow money. More important, he’s found the mint where the money is printed.

  Now they can see the length of the hall, which is guarded by the arch of a metal detector with a security camera mounted on top. In the space beyond, a man sits at an old metal desk, a slender man in a cheap suit and Ivy League tie. He gives them a sour stare as they advance down the confines of the hall. The pale yellow walls are smeared with a cloud of grime at child level and a jungle of graffiti above, a spontaneous documentation of boredom in the extreme.

  As they near the metal detector, Lane can see that the clerk is flanked by two men who slouch arrogantly in metal folding chairs. They wear the car coats and wool slacks of the Bad Boys, with the coat collars turned up and fronts left open with the big wooden buttons hanging limp. One wears lensless glasses with black plastic frames that are highly compressed along the horizontal, giving him an Asian cast.

  They ignore the girl and focus on Lane, and he knows what they see. They are looking at a middle-aged man of six feet who is in better shape than a middle-aged man should be, a handsome man whose thick brown hair is salted with just a hint of gray, a man whose bright eyes devour the detail around him and convert it into a physical calculus of self-protection.

  He puts them on edge, but he doesn’t care. He’ll do the deal, present his card, get his crow money, and get out. He already has what he needs: the physical location of the Bird’s bank, the central terminal in his financial operations. Back downtown, they’ll use the data to set up a surgical strike to take out the operation. A sudden storm of men, machines, and weapons will race through the facility and lay waste to the computers, the microwave links, the presses, and the networks.

  “One at a time!” the clerk shouts in a voice of castrated authority. “Girl first.”

  Sabrina advances through the metal detector and places her card in a slot on a raised spot on the desktop. The Bad Boy with the glasses continues to watch Lane while his partner eyes the girl. Lane looks back down the doorless hall, which is only two people wide. He has to admit it makes for good security, minimizing the strength of any frontal assault on the banking room.

  The debit card Sabrina inserts has a ten-dollar balance, her compensation after a 50 percent cut to the Bird. When the card is fully inserted, the display activates and a floating image shudders into view a foot above the desk. A duplicate logo appears and does its serpentine fold in three dimensions as the clerk watches. The card is legit. Then a column of figures materializes, with a blinking line at the bottom showing the card’s balance.

  “Five bucks,” the clerk announces. His voice is picked up by an invisible microphone, and the figures change on the screen to show a zero balance. At the same time, the logo image unknots, and a whirring sound comes from inside the desk. At the front, five bills in crow money spit out into a curved trough.

  Sabrina turns away and starts out. “Say, how much pussy does five bucks buy?” the clerk asks with a leering grin. “Can you tell me that, sweetheart? I don’t get out much anymore.”

  The two Bad Boys respond with minor grunts that approximate a chuckle and the clerk belches out a disgusting giggle. Sabrina ignores it, walks past Lane and on down the hall. She’s done. She’s gone.

  “Okay, big boy,” the clerk says to Lane. “Whaddya got?”

  Lane already has his card out as he shuffles through the metal detector. The Bad Boy with the glasses comes out of his slouch and straightens in his chair. His hands stay in his coat pockets, one of which undoubtedly holds a cocked pistol of medium caliber. Lane senses trouble, but can’t pin it down. He puts the card in the slot and watches the display come up with its contorted logo dance.

  “Seventy-five bucks,” the clerk announces. “Big guy, big money.” He looks up at Lane as the cash lands in the trough. “Big guy. Right?”

  Rather than acknowledge the humor of this little clerical martinet and prolong the exchange, Lane simply puts on a faint grin and reaches for the money. Then it all goes wrong.

  “Hey, buddy,” the Bad Boy with glasses says as he comes to his feet. “Where’s your lobe? How come you ain’t sportin’ the lobe?”

  Lane’s heart jumps, a quick pre-atrial contraction. He knows immediately what’s happened. He’s forgotten to put on his cover lobe after removing his real one. The cover lobe was issued by the department and recovered at the end of the assignment. It was, of course, a vast work of data fiction. A square centimeter of false information polished to high gloss, installed in a fashionable setting of platinum and worn as an earring. Birth records, school records, medical records, résumés, taxes, finances, felonies, genome profile. It was all there.

  But somehow Lane had forgotten, and his naked earlobe was screaming trouble to the Bad Boy. But no time to worry. He gauges the distance between himself and his adversary. Too far. And now the other one is coming to his feet. He has to stall until the position is right. His best move is to go on the offensive.

  “You didn’t scan the girl. How come you gotta scan me?”

  The clerk smiles and settles back like someone anticipating a critically acclaimed piece of entertainment. “Seen the girl around,” he smugly explains. “Never seen you around.”

  “Doesn’t mean I haven’t been around,” Lane shoots back. “Just means you haven’t seen me.”

  “Don’t think so,” the clerk replies. “Think I’ve seen just about everybody.” He turns to the Bad Boy with the glasses, who stands several feet to Lane’s right. “Wouldn’t you say so, boy?”

  “Yeah, I’d say so,” Mr. Glasses offers. He shoots Lane a nasty smile and moves forward. “I think we better have a little talk about this, friend. And I think we’ll start with you putting your hands behind your head.”

  Because of the metal detector, they’ve assumed Lane isn’t armed. As he crosses his hands behind his neck, his thumb and forefinger reach down his shirt collar and close on a slender plastic cylinder holding a single charge of pressurized pepper spray.

  Lane glances to his left and sees the second Bad Boy on his feet, hand jammed in his gun pocket but not moving. It’ll be close but he can do it. If he doesn’t, he’s a dead man. The police don’t recover bodies anymore. They just cancel your contract and put the balance due back into the operating budget.

  Mr. Glasses comes forward to check Lane’s pockets. As he moves into range, Lane draws the pepper spray out of his shirt and brings it front and center. Mr. Glasses raises a hand toward his head for protection, but it’s too late. Lane squeezes hard on the tube and the burning mist rockets out, bursts through the empty glasses frames, and saturates both of the Bad Boy’s corneas. As he howls in pain, Lane lets go of the tube, steps forward and reaches into the man’s coat pocket for the gun he knows is there.

  By now, the second man has come to his senses and drawn a pistol. Lane feels the gun handle in the pocket of Mr. Glasses and pulls the weapon free. At the same time, Mr. Glasses lurches in agony, cups his eyes, and spins to face the second man.

&nbs
p; “Shoot him!” the clerk screams at the man.

  Reflexively, the armed man obeys in a panic and fires three shots from a medium-caliber automatic. The bullets rip through Mr. Glasses’s torso, leaving foaming tunnels of wasted tissue through the lungs, heart, and liver. One bullet lodges in the spine, but two others exit out the back just as Lane starts to bring his gun up. The bullets smack his multilayered vest hard enough to knock him back a few inches, but not enough to stop him from taking aim before he loses the temporary cover of the dead man.

  As Mr. Glasses remains pitch forward, Lane fires two shots that punch through the second man’s sternum within an inch of each other. One vaporizes the aortic arch and terminates all circulation, and the second man falls backward and collapses.

  By now, the terrified clerk has run to a steel door with no handle, and is pounding on it as he drops to his knees. “Get me out! Get me out! Please, God! Get me out!”

  Lane makes a cynical note that the little asshole has suddenly got religion now that the goons are gone. He leaps over the body of Mr. Glasses, runs down the short hall and out into the open space with the queue ropes.

  “He’s out there! Get him! Kill him!” the clerk screams.

  Lane has a major problem: In a second or two, armed men will be running down the short hall and will catch him in the open room, without cover. The path to the exit is blocked by dozens of rows of ropes and posts.

  He has only one option. He sprints down one of the rows, and hurdles the rope at the rear just as he hears a shot fired and feels the shock wave of a bullet tickle the air near his head. He makes an airborne leap and folds into a ball as he crashes through the soaped window. A shell of exploding glass cuts the hot air and forms a brief copper mist against the setting sun. On the sidewalk, he rolls once, scrambles to his feet, and sees a trolley nearly upon him. He sprints across its path and then runs along the far side until he matches its speed, grabs a railing by the rear door, and pitches himself aboard. As he takes a seat by an Oldie, he looks back to see three Bad Boys clambering out the vacant window and looking up and down the street. He discreetly tucks his pistol away in the belt of his jeans. Before the last round of budgets, he had a cell phone with a direct connection to police dispatch. No more. He can’t deliver the location of the press until he gets back across the river.