Lone Wolf

by Nigel Findley

  I leave the booth and swing back onto my bike, fire it up, and cruise off slowly. Yeah, looks like I’m blown big-time. Maybe it’s time to place that call to the Star ...

  But, hey, why not wait till after oh five-thirty? Blown is usually like knocked-up, it doesn’t happen halfway. But maybe the convincing lie I threw at Paco—that I’m a victim of a post-mortem smear campaign by Ranger and/or Bart— isn’t a lie at all. I might do the same thing if I thought a rival within the gang was trying to geek me. Clutching at straws, I know, but sometimes the longest of odds pay off.

  * * *

  If I didn’t know better. I’d say my watch had stopped. The hour and a half between 0400 and 0530 seemed to drag on for a least a fragging lifetime, and only the growing pinky-red smear of the coming dawn to the east confirms that time hasn’t come to a screeching halt. My body and brain are both reminding me in no uncertain terms that I had less than two hours sleep before the Wenonah hallway became a shooting gallery, but I can’t let myself pay any attention. The soykaf I’m sipping from a vending-machine cup is hot enough to scald my mouth, and tastes like it’s got enough chemicals to ensure me a nice collection of cancers by the time I’m thirty-five, but pain and disgust are the only things keeping me going at the moment.

  After talking to Paco, I needed some way to kill ninety minutes without killing myself in the process. If I was paranoid before, I’m doubly so now. Seattle’s a big fragging sprawl, but the Cutters—in one form or another—are spread across the whole fragging city. The odds are low of running into someone who knows me or who’s been sent out gunning for me, but the possibility is definitely there, no matter where I go in the sprawl. So I just cruise randomly, eventually ending up in the Pier 42 area, near where we blew the drek out of the Eighty-Eights’ warehouse. Safe as anywhere, I suppose, and safer than most. The Eighty-Eights could well be out in force, expecting more trouble. Sure, I might come to grief at their hands, but this is one place members of the Cutters aren’t likely to show up. Anyway, there’s a phone booth near the Pier 42 gate, a bus shelter with a (surprisingly) unvandalized soykaf machine—nice and dark inside, now that I’ve smashed the lights with the grip of my H & K—and a disused mobile office for me to stash my bike behind. I chew some more gum for the optical pickup, and find that makes me feel even more hyper.

  At last the alarm I’ve set on my watch whines at me, and it’s time to place the call.

  Like last time, Paco picks up on the first ring. “Larson?” he says, and all my internal warnings are screaming up a fragging storm. Paco’s only called me Larson once in all the time I’ve known him, and that was when he thought he was going to get his hoop shot off in the Lake Meridian warehouse.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I tell him slowly, thinking fast. “Got the word for me?”

  “I got the good word,” he tells me. “False alarm, ’mano. False alarms all round. The guns are all called back in.” His voice is caim, cool—neutral and precise. And there’s a message in that. I only hope I’m reading it right.

  “Yeah? What went down?”

  “It’s like I told you last time, ’mano,” he says. “Bart buried a package of lies, and when he went, there was nobody to keep it buried.”

  Another warning: Paco hadn’t said anything about that. I was the one who had. “Yeah?” I let a hint of hope creep into my voice.

  “Yeah, Larson,” he echoes. “Blake and Vladimir looked into it, and they saw it’s a lousy frame-job.” He chuckles, but there isn’t any humor in it. “Guess Box or someone popped early, sending the guns out.”

  And another one. Paco said “down by law”. The way I’ve heard the phrase used, it’s fragging near an official pronouncement from the gang boss. If it was just Box overreacting and sending out the Praetorians, Paco wouldn’t have used those words.

  “Blake wants you to come back in, Larson,” Paco goes on urgently. “Come on home, ’mano. The big boys think Bart might have planted other packages—for the Star, maybe even for the news snoops, omae, Blake thinks we might be able to intercept them, but he wants you to take charge of it. Hear me?”

  I hear him, all right. I let my voice drag, like I’m bagged to the bone—not a tough acting job at the moment—and tell him, “I hear you, Paco. Thanks, priyatel. I ...” I cough wetly. “I’m burned, chummer, let me tell you. I caught one when I scragged the hit squad and I’m hurting.”

  “Come on in, then,” he says urgently. “Come on home and the Cutters’ll take care of you.”

  It's all I can do not to chuckle out loud. Message received five-by-five. Paco, my friend. Thanks, bolshoi thanks. “I'll be in,” I lie convincingly. Than I’m off the phone, onto my bike, and back on the fragging road again.

  10

  I'm blown, big-time gonzo blown and no denying it this time. What Paco said—and, more important, what he didn’t say— told me that, loud and clear. When he put out feelers, somehow Blake or one of the other big boys figured he’d talked to me and would be doing it again soon. Paco wasn’t alone when I spoke with him this last time; other people were listening in to make sure he'd say the words that would get me fried and to make sure he didn’t warn me. But he did warn me, in ways that Blake and the others wouldn’t scan. And he’d done it even though everything must be pointing to me as a fragging Lone Star narc. Still he clued me. Still he saved my life. It had to come from loyalty; nothing else made sense.

  So there’s not avoiding it anymore. It’s time to make the call.

  Multiple calls, actually. There’s no way the phone-drones in the Star bureaucracy are going to let a call from a street drek like me go straight through to the people I want to contact. And, for obvious reasons, those same phone-drones can’t know that I’m an undercover op. In the old days, I’d probably have been given a single phone number that would connect me directly with some higher-up’s office, but today that kind of direct line is too much of a risk—a datapath for outside deckers to use to penetrate a corporate official’s private comm and computing system. No, these days all calls to and from Star officials have to go through switching systems with wetware components. And those wetware components—the phone-drones again—don’t know Rick Larson from any other hunk of guttermeat in the sprawl. Still, there are procedures in place.

  I scan the street around me. It’s 0545 and the dock area’s starting to come to life. I can’t stay here much longer, but I figure I’m safe enough for the first call. Leaving the chewing gum in place over the optical pickup, I key the first of several numbers I’ve memorized.

  “Lone Star main switchboard,” a synthesized voice answers. "If you know the five-digit extension of the party you wish to reach, please enter it now. If you do not know the extension ...” I punch in a string of five zeroes, cutting the voice off in mid-blather.

  There’s silence for an instant, then another voice—also synthesized—pipes up. “You have reached Lone Star Personnel’s automated attendant,” it drones. “Regular office hours are oh-nine-hundred to seventeen-hundred, Monday to Friday. Please call back.” There’s a click and it sounds like the connection’s broken, but I know better. I punch in my five zeroes again. When I’m done, the phone beeps once, and there’s more silence. No outgoing message or other voice prompt, but I know a digitizing recorder is online somewhere in the depths of “suit country” in the Star HQ building.

  “It’s me,” I say simply, confident that the computer on the other end will figure out who “me” is from my voice pattern. “I’m blown. Call two-three twelve-hundred.” And I hang up.

  I hurry around back to my bike, mount up, and I’m off. I’ve got four and a quarter hours until I’m due to make my next phone call. (That’s what the number I quoted at the end means. Yeah, it sounded like I was giving the Star an LTG number to call. Actually, I was telling them when to expect my call. The first two digits of the “phone number” were meaningless. The data content’s in the last four digits: the time of my intended call, plus two hundred. Got it? Theoretically, if anyone w
as tapping the line, they’d keep themselves busy tracing LTG number 23-1200. I wonder if whoever owns that number might soon be receiving a visit from the Cutters . . .)

  Okay, okay, why don’t I just jander on down to the Lone Star HQ building, check in with a receptionist, and wait in a nice, safe office while word gets passed to the right ears—to the few people in the building who actually know about me—until someone comes to collect me? A couple of reasons. First of all, even if I’m blown with the Cutters, my usefulness in the Seattle area may not be over. I could go undercover somewhere else, on some other assignment. That wouldn’t be possible if I openly showed up at the Star HQ: lots of groups with an interest in the Star—and vice versa— keep a close eye on the pyramidal building at Second and Union. Odds are I’d be marked and made, the fact that I’ve got Star connections spreading throughout the underworld, and my next undercover assignment would be my last. Boom.

  There’s another fragging good reason, too: self-preservation. For Blake to send a hit team out after me instead of waiting for me to come back to the safe house must mean he thought I wasn’t coming back. He must have believed I was bugging out to scurry on home and spill my fragging guts to the Star. It would be a simple matter to set a few watchers around Star HQ—snipers, maybe, backed with magical talent—and hammer a bullet or a spell into my brain when I show up. Not a trick Blake would miss, let me tell you.

  So if the HQ’s out, why not pick another Lone Star facility, one of the “station houses” elsewhere in the sprawl? The Cutters can’t possibly have a gold team watching every one of them. Well, I’ve also got a reason not to do that, chummer, and it’s related to my cover story. A cover isn’t worth squat if anybody other than your direct control knows it’s a cover. So that means the Lone Star street monsters and patrol cops all think—if they know of me at all—that I’m a gang-banger through and through, run to Seattle to avoid the big heat in Milwaukee. I’m supposed to be a fragging cop-kilier, omae! Part of my cover is that I greased a patrol car full of Lone Star Milwaukee personnel—pumped three grenades into it, then cut down the two survivors as they tried to climb out of the burning wreck. That kind of background builds credibility and rep in gangland, and it also explains why I’m not still in Milwaukee if I had such a good time there. What it doesn’t do is endear me to cops.

  If I were to drop in on one of the “station houses” and tell the local yokels to phone thus-and-so extension at HQ and tell whoever answers, “Larson’s here,” they’re not going to do it without trying to idee me first. They idee me through the computer and, "bing, up it comes—“cop killer,” various wants and warrants out, armed and considered very dangerous, etcetera etcetera drekcetera.

  So what do the local yokels do? Would they phone the extension I give them? Like frag they would. They’d simply toss me in the can for a good, long time until I could be shipped back to Milwaukee to face charges. And that would be if I was very lucky. What’s more likely is that the Lone Star Seattle street monsters will live up to the rep they’ve got all across the continent, and arrange to have me “shot while trying to escape.” I’m not farcing you, that’s the way they do things. Sure, if I had a badge or idee card or fragging Lone Star decoder ring or something, it’d be different. But you don’t carry that kind of drek undercover. I’ve got nothing to identify me but a little data that a street rat wouldn’t know. But for that to work, someone’s got to listen to me before trying to cap me off.

  No, thanks. I think I’ll go through channels, if it’s all the same to you.

  In the meantime I’ve got four-plus hours to kill, and my body’s screaming for sleep. With my brain fogged like this, I know I’ll start making mistakes if I don’t get some rest. Right now. But where? The Wenonah's out, and showing up at a flophouse hotel might attract too much of the wrong kind of attention. (How tough would it be for Blake to spread the word to all back-alley dosses in the sprawl—there aren’t that many of them, after all—saying to call such and such a number if a slag matching my description shows up, five hundred nuyen in it for you? Not tough at all.) Luckily I do have a least one contact the Cutters don’t know about, and I should be able to parlay it into a doss to crash in. I find another pay phone—this one still under the Alaskan Way viaduct, but up nearer Madison—and place the call.

  The phone picks up on the first ring, which surprises me. The slag I’m calling likes to get up early, I know that, but not this early. “Yes?” he says, in that clear, precise voice of his. No trace of sleep in the voice, none at all. Warning alarms go off all over again.

  “It’s me,” I say, and hold my breath. If something’s really fragged up, he’ll let me know with his next few words.

  “Good morning, Richard,” he says, and I breathe again.

  His name’s Nicholas Finnigan—I don’t think anybody would ever have the jam to call him Nick—and he’s this dignified old fart of fifty-some, fat and balding, who carries himself through life like nothing can touch him. (The one time it did, I was there to pull his fat out of the fire, or it’d have been the last time, too.) He’s a writer—a real writer, not a knowledge engineer, a dinosaur who works in linear text, words in a row, instead of hypertext. Espionage thrillers, for frag’s sake. Personally I wouldn’t have thought there was any market for it, but he makes out better than okay— he’s got a house, an honest-to-Ghu house, near the Snohomish River and a stone’s throw away from the S-S border.

  I met Nicholas quite close to where I’m now phoning him— maybe that memoiy subconsciously affected my choice—some six months ago. Somebody had made contact with the Cutters about buying some Gremlin man-pack SAMs, but the gang leadership had reason to believe the meet was dirty. I was leading the team whose job was to snatch the slag who came to the meet, then drag him off somewhere to sweat out of him what was really going down. (I figure Blake was suspicious that the whole deal was a Lone Star sting.)

  Anyway, the meet goes down, and the slag I’m supposed to grab is this pudgy old geezer in a fragging tweed jacket, wearing spectacles, for Christ’s sake. Nicholas Finnigan. I realized immediately this wasn’t a sting, but it wasn’t a clean buy either. I’d set my assets around the area, and they started moving in as soon as Finnigan showed. Apparently sensing something was going down, he was edgy and ready to bail. If he panicked and ran, I knew one of my assets would cap him.

  So fragged if I didn’t expose my own position and run into the open ground and wave off my troops. Then I started firing off into the dark at a whole lot of nothing, calling in the fragging clans on some innocent dumpsters. While my fellow gangers were blowing the drek out of the scenery, I hustled Finnigan out of the area and sent him on his way. When I did that—I still can’t believe it—he gave me his fragging business card. Anyway, when he was clear I went back and presided over the cleanup, mocking up a cover story for Blake and crew that the meet had been dirty but the hostile overwatch team had popped early, letting the contact escape in the ensuing firefight. So sorry. Blake bought it, and that was it.

  A few days later, I called the number on the business card just out of curiosity. And that’s how I came to know Nicholas Finnigan. (When I reported all this to my controls at the Star, they gave me royal drek for the whole thing, of course. But frag them.)

  “Morning, Nicholas,” I say. I grin, and can’t help adding,

  “Doing any more research into buying ordnance?”

  He chuckles warmly. “I believe the lesson you taught me on that subject is still in force,” he says. “ ‘Write what you know’ is all very well, but I’ve come to accept that ‘knowing’ from secondary research is sufficient in some areas.”

  I shake my head. Finnigan always talks that way, and you’ve got to stick with him to the very end of his convoluted talk to know what the frag he’s saying. Good guy, though. Under other circumstances, I’d enjoy him as a friend, not just as a contact. “Good to hear,” I tell him. “Keep it that way, and keep out of trouble.”

  There’s a momentary pause,
and the alarms go off yet again. “Perhaps you should follow your own advice, Richard,” he says slowly.

  “Keeping out of trouble?”

  “Yes,” he says. “It seems you might need some remedial work on that.”

  "What’s going down?” I ask, but the cold knot in my stomach is telling me I already know. How the frag did Blake or the Cutters get a line on Nicholas?

  But his next words blow that train of thought off the rails. “What do you know about Lightbringer Services Corporation?” he asks me.

  “What?”

  “Lightbringer Services Corporation,” he repeats. “I have a business card right here in front of me.”

  I shake my head. “Doesn’t mean squat,” I tell him. “Sounds like something from the Tir. though.”

  “The LTG number and Matrix address are local,” Nicholas tells me, “yet the name does have resonances of the Land of Promise, I agree. And the rather earnest young gentleman who gave me the card was an elf.”

  “What ‘earnest young gentleman’?” I want to know. “The one who came here looking for you earlier this morning, Richard.” His voice is casual, but I can tell he knows this is serious. “He and his two friends, who stayed in the car. He seemed very eager to learn what I knew about you.” He snorts. “I think he was very disappointed to discover that was next to nothing.”

  “Did he believe you?” The words are out of my mouth before I know what I’m going to say.

  A moment of silence on the other end, then Nicholas says slowly, “Hmm, I see. I rather think he did. Otherwise we might not be having this conversation, is that what you mean?”

  I relax a little. Nicholas doesn’t actually know squat about me, but fragged if I know what he’s guessed. I’ve never told him anything, not even my cover story, and he’s never asked. “What else did the elf want?”

  "Well, he told me that you might find yourself in a great deal of trouble, Richard, trouble that could well be fatal. Oh, he didn’t say that in so many words,” he amends quickly, “but that is most certainly the inference he wished me to draw. He implied that he and his friends were on the side of the angels, as it were, and that if you were to make contact with me I should inform them immediately. Hence the business card. I made all the correct concerned noises, of course.” He chuckles wryly. “I really think he believed he had me gulled.”