Instead, Blake called in a marker from the boss of the Cutters’ Atlanta “chapter,” and within twenty-four hours of Ranger’s last ride, there was a new hoop in Ranger’s chair. Bubba, his nickname was—I drek you not; fragging Bubba—a red-necked Georgia cracker who also happened to be ork. (Considering the way a lot of good ol’ boys view the metaraces, it’s surprising Bubba managed to avoid lynching himself. Or is that too cynical?) To my eternal surprise, I found myself both liking and respecting the newcomer after talking to him for a while. Even though his accent made him sound like his IQ was in the room-temperature range—and yes, we’re talking Celsius here—he turned out to be smart as a whip, aggressive but willing to listen to people more familiar with the scoop going down in Seattle. I could almost get to like him.
Even though I didn’t get the war boss slot, there must be more of a turnover in the ranks than I thought. Or, at least, that’s the way I interpret it when I get called in to talk to big-boss Blake a couple of days after the explosion.
Blake’s in his private quarters on the upper floor of the Sea-Tac safe house, the one on South 164th Street. Box the troll is standing watch outside the door, his asymmetrical head ducked forward but still brushing against the ceiling. He doesn’t ask me my business or do the “friend-or-foe” crap; he just reaches behind him and opens the door when he sees me coming down the hall. I jander on past him, flipping him a mock salute, then I’m into one of Blake’s private residences.
I don’t know what I expected—or if I really expected anything in particular—but I’m still surprised. The place is light, airy-looking—tans and off-whites. I guess you could describe the decor as “pseudo-African”. There’s some strange kind of woven carpet on the floor, a deer pelt—or maybe it’s real antelope—on one wall, and a couple of brutal-looking short thrusting spears on another. Assegai, you’d probably call them. It sounds weird, I know, but none of it’s overdone or artificial. With the few people who ever come up here, the setup can’t possibly be for the purpose of impressing others. I suppose Blake must like it. I find myself wondering again about his background. He’s never pushed the Afro-American thing at all. He’s black, but so what? Since goblinization, skin pigmentation doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Does all this drek come from a single African country or is it some kind of pan-African hodgepodge? Got me hangin’, chummer.
Anyway, there’s Blake himself, sprawled almost bonelessly in a big tan armchair. Sitting on the floor beside him, long legs tucked under her, is an unbelievably gorgeous woman—black as night, with eyes so big and soft you could fall right in and drown. I hardly give her a glance, though, because my attention’s drawn so strongly to Blake, who still hasn’t moved or said a word. (And anyone who knows me understands what that means. Take my attention away from a woman? Come on . . .)
So, Blake, he’s got this lazy grin on his face, and it makes me think of a sated lion. Satisfied man. I think I can guess why, though I suppose it’s possible I’m wrong.
Blake raises his eyes and looks at me. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move, but the woman by his side gets the message. She doesn’t so much stand up as flow to her feet. She touches his cheek with a fingertip, then drifts off, out through a door behind Blake, presumably going into the bedroom. As she shuts the door behind her, the room seems darker, as though a major source of light had vanished.
“Larson.” Blake speaks the name slowly, quietly. I feel a tingle in the back of my neck. “I’ve heard good things about you, Larson,” he goes on after a moment. “You’ve got supporters, people who trust you. Did you know that?”
I figure playing it chill is the way to go, so I just shrug. I’m suddenly nervous as hell that he’s going to say something about Ranger, and I’m even more nervous that he’ll sense my discomfort and want to know why.
But if he has any suspicions—or more, than suspicions—he doesn’t seem interested in voicing them ... yet. “I want you on my staff, Larson,” he says after another long moment. “Call it ‘personal aide’.” He chuckles, and it sounds like a big cat purring. “Or call it bodyguard-gofer if you like. Interested?”
Interested? Interested in becoming a member of the personal Praetorian guard for the boss of the Seattle Cutters? Interested in getting in on just about every fragging meeting of the higher-ups? Interested in knowing just where Blake is all the time—well, most of the time—and what he’s up to? Well, golly gee whizzickers, let me think about it for a few minutes . . .
I shrug again, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done to keep stone about it. “Yeah.” I allow. “Yeah, I’m interested.”
He nods, and there’s a strange glint in his eyes. He knows something, or thinks he knows something. About me? What does he know, or suspect? That I greased Bart and had a hand in Ranger’s departure? Or something else? The more I hang with Blake and the other higher-ups, the more I risk somebody figuring out who and what I am. But if I play it totally safe, I’ll never learn anything worth knowing. How do I strike the balance?
I’m getting too old for this deep-cover drek.
* * *
If Blake does know or suspect I’m Star and he’s just trying to suck me into a trap, he's not in any great rush to trigger it. For the next week I follow the big boss-man around like a good little gofer, sometimes running errands for him, but more often just standing around beside and behind him and looking stone. The big troll called Box is the head of Blake’s Praetorian guard, it turns out. It also turns out I’ve sadly underrated Box all these months. Sure, he talks like he’s got rocks in his mouth and crammed down his throat; sure, like anyone who resembles an escapee from a nightmare factory, he has an uphill battle credibility-wise. But I openly and freely admit that Box isn’t the congenital idiot everyone takes him for, and that his warped and bulbous skull contains a prodigious amount of trivia—for example, everything you never wanted to know (and were too smart to ask) about the World Combat Cyclists League plus its past and current roster of sociopathic murderers . . . er, players, yeah, that’s it. He also likes archaic, nineteen-sixties “folk” music. After Big Bad Bart, I can forgive him for that, however. He also claims he could once play the Irish whistle before he goblinized and his fingers got too big. Under other circumstances, I could get to like him, but I can’t afford to let that happen. Which is probably what I hate most about undercover work.
In the first week I got to see Blake in action, in casual face-to-face meetings and more formal settings like the war council where I introduced Ranger to the wonders of escrima. I learned a lot. First off, nothing Blake does is casual—nothing. It’s all planned out, every possible outcome, each permutation and combination worked through in that big head of his. I’ve seen him orchestrate a “chance, fortuitous” meeting with Bubba in the safe house hallway, disarming the cracker’s defenses and setting him at his ease, then “spontaneously” dropping the point that was the whole purpose of this game into the conversation, and watching the reaction.
It’s a good technique, I’ll grant the man that. Ask somebody’s opinion formally, and they’ll react like you’re forcing them to commit—publicly and irrevocably—to that position. The result? They’ll weasel and double-talk and cover their hoops and spread the blame nine ways to Sunday. Trick them into letting that same opinion slip in a “casual” conversation, and you’ll hear the closest thing to the truth—the closest thing to their real opinion—that you can get out of them without magical mind-probes or torture.
Blake’s a master of that technique, and others. He’s a frag of a leader. He listens to what everyone’s saying, everyone around him—and not only what they’re saying with their voices—and synthesizes it all into a kind of gestalt of the world. Nothing seems to surprise him, and he seems to know what people are going to say—me included—before they say it. He scares the fragging drek out of me. And what makes it worse is that I can’t even hate him.
So in a week, I figure I’ve learned more about how the Seattle Cutters work—r
eally work, deep down and dirty on the inside—than over the whole last eighteen months. Before I saw the execution of policy. Now I see that policy being made. If I’d known the movers and shakers were this fragging competent, I probably would have thrown this assignment back in my superiors’ faces. There aren't any overt, obvious threats to my life and limb, but I can feel, deep in my gut, that I’m in more danger now than I’ve been for the whole last year and a half.
But enough sniveling. I was getting more real, hard intelligence about the Cutters than ever before—the deep, central, policy-related drek that I figure the Star put me here to scoop. Trouble was, it was getting a lot harder to find opportunities for getting my reports out. As Blake’s “personal aide” and gofer, I was basically on duty seven or eight hours a day and “on call” most of the rest of the time. That made it tougher to get to meets where I could hand off my reports.
Frag, it was even hard making time to log onto UOL and check the message base. Who knows how many potential meets I hosed just because I didn’t know about them? But I figured that would change eventually. Things would settle down as I got more worked into the schedule. For the moment. all I could do was let my handlers at the Star know I was still alive and sucking air—a simple matter of posting innocuous responses on various message bases, the actual message in the fact that I responded at all, not in the words I used. Meanwhile, I would save up all the intelligence I was gathering for one motherfragger of a report when I finally got to deliver it.
And the key burner fact in that report’s going to be that the Cutters are getting into bed with some Tir-based corp.
Okay, the corp linkup isn’t that much of a burner. Everyone knows—or at least guesses—that the Cutters do dirty work for various Seattle-based corps. To my personal knowledge, the gang has taken minor contracts with outfits ranging from small fry like Designer Genes to a half a dozen or so “triple-A” megacorps like Ares Macrotechnology. And those are the ones I know about.
What’s interesting is that this new contract is from out of sprawl—in fact, from out of United Canadian and American States entirely. The general buzz on the street is that the Tir doesn’t do much business in Seattle, except through numerous intermediaries so that the high-tone elves don’t get their lily-white hands dirty. Now, I'm hearing something else. If the buzz is on the money, there’s a major Tir corp that not only wants to do direct business in the plex, but is also interested in acquiring assets on the shady side of the street. Something the Star might be interested in knowing about? No fragging farce.
I don't know why the Tir corp chose the Cutters, or how they got in contact with Blake. It’s not like you can just look up “Cutters, Executive Offices” in the LTG listings. (I know how I’d do it, but I’ve got background knowledge and resources an out-of-sprawl corp wouldn’t have ... I think.) Anyway, that’s basically irrelevant. They did make contact, and they did carry out preliminary negotiations.
And now, there’s the first official face-to-face meet between Blake and reps of the corp, whichever one it happens to be.
The meet’s scheduled for the ops room in the sale house near Sea-Tac—the place where I drek-kicked Ranger—and Blake’s pulling out all the stops. From what I hear, it’s a “closed” meeting: only Blake and his advisors—Vladimir and Springblossom—and the reps of the Tir corp present. The ops room will be sealed tighter than a devil rat’s ass, with an army of mundane and magical firepower outside. The room itself is protected by a big-time medicine lodge—set up by Springblossom, who, for the first time in our acquaintance, isn’t stoned out of her head. That means nobody can eavesdrop astrally or slam some unpleasant spell into a fetish carried in by one of the corp reps (or, presumably, get in or out by sidestepping to another plane). Basically, the idea is that Blake and his advisors won’t have their Praetorian guard with them, but the corp reps will know that if they do anything ill-advised (like scragging someone), they’re not going to get out of the ops room alive.
(A quick digression. If Blake’s got any brains—which he does—he must still be a tad edgy about security. Are the corp reps who they say they are? Or is the whole thing a setup? Drek, if I was a rival gang leader wanting to off Blake, this would be a great way to do it. Lots of possibilities come immediately to mind. Okay, so the Cutters’ security is set up so the corp reps get geeked if they kill Blake. But that only happens if Blake knows he’s been hit. How about a slow-acting poison or bioagent? Three days later, after the “corp reps” are long gone, Blake, Vladimir, and Springblossom convulse and die. Or maybe you don’t even have to be that tricky. One of the reps could be a kamikaze, wired with explosives. Or ... well, anyway, you get the idea. All I can do is assume that Blake’s done his homework on background checks and all that drek. And, of course, hope that if there is a belly-bomb involved, it’s only a small one. End of digression.)
My station for all of this folderol is in the hallway outside the big door of the ops room. Box is beside me, wearing his finest torn leathers. We’re both armed to the teeth, but that’s all for show. Our orders are to keep everything in our pants unless and until Blake personally orders us to take action. And yes, Virginia, even if it’s a case of self-defense. (That’s one order that’s going to be honored more in the breach than the observance, you can bet your hoop on that.) I know there are other soldiers stationed throughout the safe house, so the corp reps are going to have to march through a gauntlet of armed and nasty gang muscle—a reminder that they’re in deep and had better play nicely. Blake and Springblossom are already in the ops room, waiting, while Vladimir has the singular honor of greeting the guests (and being first on the chopping block if their main purpose is just to blow drek up).
So now I hear footsteps coming down the stairs. I see Box draw himself up as close to his full height as the ceiling allows, and I do the same myself. We see four people: Vladimir and three others. I don’t stare—got to be polite here—but I do give them what scrutiny I can via my peripheral vision. Vladimir’s talking quietly to a tall, thin elf in a corp-style suit that probably cost almost as much as my bike. Handsome guy, this elf—young (of course), but with a real serious air about him, like he’s seen a frag of a lot in his life. Definitely corp.
To his left and half a step back is a human I take to be the elf’s executive assistant or aide or something. Medium height, medium build. I can’t see his face—it’s screened by the elf and Vladimir, both of whom are taller than the aide. And then my attention’s grabbed and held by the third of the corp reps.
I’ve seen elf women before, of course. Who hasn’t? But never one like this. She’s tall—probably more than two meters in bare feet (oh, what a thought . . .)—about as tall as me. But she looks much taller, and it’s not just because of the silver-capped heels on her shoes. She’s thin and willowy and long and lithe, and she moves like quicksilver—fluid and effortless. Long, pale face with eyes that gleam like bright gold. Her hair’s fine and straight, so pale it could almost be white, and it falls free to just above her butt. She wears a biz-style jacket of severe cut—black velveteen over a synthsilk blouse of faintest jade-green. Her skirt’s the same fabric, calf-length, but slit up the side to just below the point of her hip.
Politeness be damned, there are some times you’ve just got to stare. I do, she notices, and she likes it. I get a speculative glance from the corner of one of those gold eyes, and the hint of something that couid be a smile, and suddenly I want to run in circles howling, or dragging a wing, or some damn thing. (No, be honest, what I really want to do is investigate the degrees of freedom allowed by that split skirt.) I watch her receding rear aspect until the group is into the ops room and the door closes behind her. Then I grin over at Box.
The big troll’s shaking his head sadly, apparently feeling yet another aspect of the tragedy of goblinization. I can commiserate: I’m not going to get my hands on any of that either.
* * *
It’s a long meeting, and I’ve got plenty of time to think things o
ver. Mainly, that means, to put the elf woman in perspective. The big question is, since there’s no way I can hear what Blake and the Tir reps are discussing at the moment— what can I provide the Star that they’ll want to know?
The answer is, the best descriptions I can give them of the reps. Obviously, verbal descriptions aren’t as good as holos or vids—and why, I ask myself again, didn’t the Star ever upgrade my headware so I could download actual images into a datachip?—but they’ll be better than nothing. If the three people meeting with Blake always work together, even incomplete descriptions of all three could be enough to idee them.
Okay, so I had a good mental image of the woman, a very good image. Not as much on the elf talking to Vladimir, though, and nothing at all on the human aide (if that’s what he really is). So that’s my task when the meeting’s over.
And finally—finally, thank the patron god of bladder control—it’s over. The door opens with the whir-click of maglocks disengaging, and the delegation begins to emerge. Springblossom and Vladimir first, followed closely by the elf woman. We make momentary eye contact, but—biz before pleasure, frag it—I glance away quickly and focus my attention on the male elf who’s walking out alongside Blake.
This time I give him the full once-over. A centimeter or two taller than the woman, similar slender build, but while she’s all speed and grace, he looks like there’s steel-hard muscles in there as well. Aquiline nose, dark eyes, olive skin. Black hair cropped short on top, but collar-length at the sides and in the back—a typical conservative corp style. No jewelry, no distinguishing marks that I can spot. Not much, but it’s the best I can do.
Taking up the rear of the group is the human aide/whatever. Not as tall as the other two and weighing eighty to eighty-five kilos. Medium height and medium build, basically what I picked up the first time out. He’s wearing a conservative-cut biz suit in muted maroon, with black accessories and accents. Dark hair, short all over and subtly spiked. Dark olive complexion, dark eyes . ..
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