“Huh?” I blink at that. I know it’s a setup. How does he? Nicholas laughs again. “Oh, his lines were well-scripted, and he delivered them very convincingly, but I’ve read them before, many times. For heaven’s sakes, I've written them. Our elven friend was what one might call a ‘blind probe’. Anyone who’s read any of my books—or any of the classics of the genre, like Ludlum—would understand all too well. If I were plotting this, I’d have my house watched, with sufficient assets to zero or incapacitate you should you come to visit. I would also bug my phone, of course. You are using a public phone, I take it?”
I blinked again. “Yes.”
“Then I would suggest we keep this call short,” he goes on in the same intellectual, detached tone. “Calls are easy to trace.” He’s right, and I feel my paranoia click up another notch. But there are still things I’ve got to know. Normally I’d ask specific questions, but I realize I probably don’t have to with Nicholas. “How do you read it?” I ask.
“Our friend—Pietr Taleniekov is the name on his card, though his accent is purest sprawl—is a corporator through and through,” Finnigan states, like it’s holy writ. “I would not be surprised to find out that there is, in fact, a Lightbringer Services Corporation in existence, and that there is a Pietr Taleniekov on their payroll. What would further not surprise me is that the elf who spoke to me has only borrowed that name and corporate identity.
“Still,” he went on firmly, “he is a corporator with all that implies'—a ‘suit,’ you might call him. He and his superiors want you, for some reason—dead or captured, I don’t know which—and they have extensive resources and sources of information, else he would never have found me. My conclusion is that you are truly in deep trouble, Richard, but I further conclude that I have been ‘compromised’ as a source of aid. I am truly sorry.”
The cold fist that’s squeezing my heart grips tighter. “You’re compromised again,” I tell him, and my voice isn’t much more than a whisper. “You’re right, they’re probably tapping your phone. They know you’ve warned me off.”
“Very true," he says evenly, “and my only reassurance that these shadowy forces will take no action against me is that they are corporate in nature. As we all know, corporations will do nothing that has no ‘percentage’ for them.” He chuckles again. “To quote a fine line I read somewhere, ‘Revenge don’t count no beans’. I wish I had written that."
"You will,” I tell him. I glance at my watch—I’ve been on the line for three minutes and change. If there’s a tap on Finnigan’s line, it’s time to rip this joint before the troops arrive. “Keep your head down, chummer.”
“Yours also, my friend.” He pauses. “Tell me about it later, if you can. It might make an entertaining book.”
“You got that,” I tell him and hang up. If there is a later.
* * *
There’s always room for another squatter under the overpasses of the Highway 5 interchange, always another two square meters for someone else way the frag down on his luck. None of the regulars talks to newcomers, they just move out of your way—most of them, at least. With some you have to show some teeth before they back off—but you can feel the sense of kinship, the diluted, distant sense of fraternity that might almost be camaraderie if it wasn’t so miserable and despairing. After my call to Finnigan, I knew I couldn’t crash on his floor, just like I knew I couldn't hit a flophouse anywhere in the sprawl. I also knew I needed to sleep somewhere, and right fragging now, if I wanted to be any good to myself when I placed my next call in the sequence. The only place I could think of where I had any hope of shelter without having to worry about Lone Star patrols or curious night clerks was the squat-city under the interchange. There’s always room at the bottom.
So here I am, bundled up in my leather jacket, lying on the cold fragging ground, but unable to get to sleep. There’s too much drek thrashing around in my head. Pietr Tal-something, elf suit from Lightbringer fragging Services Corporation . . . like drek. Who is he and what does he want with me? Finnigan figures the elf is corp, though probably not the corp he claims, and I'll go with his reading. I don’t think a Cutter, say, could impersonate a suit well enough to fool the old writer. Which corp, then?
Given one guess, I'd say the same corp—the Tir-based outfit—that met with Blake a week back, the one that sent the delegation that included the Mr. Nemo who made my face. Makes perfect sense that far, at least.
But how the frag did that corp track down Nicholas Finnigan? I've never mentioned Finnigan to anyone in the Cutters (for obvious reasons, considering how we’d met). I did file a report with the Star, of course, describing the aborted weapons buy, and that report did mention Finnigan by name. (I had to do it: I had to explain why the Star shouldn’t worry about some outfit buying Gremlins, that it was only a drekheaded writer getting a little carried away with his research into how weapons deals go down. Slot!) But all my reports are—of course—kept very deep in the shadows, encrypted and restricted and all that drek.
For some corp to weasel Finnigan’s name out of my file as a person I might turn to for help—frag, they’d have to be way deep inside the Star. Very deep infiltration—deckers digging their grubby electronic fingers into the blackest files in the Lone Star pyramid. And that scares the living frag out of me, let me tell you.
I’ve got to tell my controls at the Star. I’ve got to tell them everything, from the mysterious corp contact with the Cutters to the possibility that their own data fortress has been compromised. (I don’t know the name of the mysterious corp, but I’ve got to call them something. The label’s irrelevant—how about IrreleCorp?) And I’ve got to take into account the possibility—no matter how slim—that this corp might have a mole inside the Star, possibly even one of my controls. I sigh and stare up at the underside of a highway off-ramp, ten meters above me. If this is the kind of drek Finnigan writes about, I’m glad I’ve never read any of his books. Interlacing my fingers behind my head into some semblance of a pillow, I close my eyes and wait for dawn.
* * *
Something whines at me and I’m bolting upright, reaching instinctively for my H & K, Then I try to reswallow my heart, and tell the wire to go back to sleep. The sound was my watch alarm, which means it’s 0945. It also means I actually managed to catch some sleep even though the aches in my joints and the fog in my head seem to deny it. I check myself over—gear and body parts—to make sure no enterprising squatter has made off with anything while I was nulled out. Deciding that I’m intact, I hobble over to my bike, swing aboard, and we’re off again.
The rain’s less now than it was yesterday, which means there are more people on the streets. Whether that’s a blessing or a curse, I’m not certain. Crowds are good for hiding, but it’s a knife that cuts both ways. It’s harder for a hunter to spot me among a pack of people, but conversely, it’s also tougher for me to make a would-be assassin before he can put a bullet into my head. Well, frag all I can do about it, so I put it out of my mind.
Another fragging phone booth, this one on Union, uphill from Highway 5, on the fringe of the “Pill Hill” region. I’m trying to grow eyes in the back of my head as I punch in another LTG number and wait. At the dulcet tones of Lone Star Personnel’s automated attendant, I jam in a five-digit extension, and listen while a snythesized voice tells me, “You have reached a non-working extension.” Yeah, right. It clicks at me but doesn’t hang up, and I enter my five zeroes.
First comes a silence that seems to last for hours, then the phone’s vidscreen lights up and I see a face I know. Shoulder-length black hair, creamy skin, eyes almost as dark as the hair—a face that you’d call beautiful if it ever showed the faintest hint of human emotion. Sarah Layton, senior manager in the Star’s Organized Crime (Gangs) department, and one of my controls.
I’m a little surprised. Layton’s the woman my contact sequence is intended to reach, but I’m not supposed to get her yet. There’s normally one more cut-out in the sequence. She wouldn’t have
changed the procedure without good reason. But what the frag, I’ve got other things on my mind.
“What’s down?” she asks, managing to cram a huge whack of cool disapproval into those two words.
I don’t answer her directly, just tell her, “Get ready to receive.” I slot my datachip, already prepared in its carrier, into the phone’s data-access port and instruct the phone to send it. While the data’s spewing through the Matrix, I scan the people passing on the sidewalk for any face that might be taking too much interest in my actions. Within seconds the phone beeps, and I know my report’s been filed.
“Scan it,” I tell Layton before she can say anything. “Show the others, get them to scan it too. I want a teleconference, all of you on the line.” I check my watch again. “Make it eleven-thirty. That should be enough time. This relay.” And I’m off the line and on my way out of the booth before she can even open her mouth to bitch about it.
11
This really isn’t the kind of conversation you want to have in a fragging phone booth right out on the fragging street. But there are some times when you just don't have any choice.
Yes, another phone booth, this one without chewing gum or anything to cover the vid pickup. For this call, I want to see and be seen.
The phone’s vid display is in split-screen mode, showing four distinct “panes.” Three contain faces, and one’s blank in case we need to show data or other visuals. I know all three faces, and if anyone I don’t know shows up, I’m out of there so fast I’ll leave a vacuum behind me.
In the top left is Sarah Layton. The slag next to her is about the same age—late forties, I’d guess—but nowhere near as well preserved: thinning, graying hair, bags under his eyes like an old hound-dog. That’s Vince McMartin. Below Sarah is “the White Flash,” one Marcus Drummond. He’s a decade younger than the other two, a real burner of a corporate warrior, climbing the old ladder fast enough to avoid the knives constantly directed at his back. Thin and sallow, with eyes that don’t miss a fragging thing. His hair’s cropped almost buzz-cut short, and it’s pure white. (For a moment his hair reminds me of the elf goddess with the Tir corp delegation, and I check Drummond’s ears. Nope, no points.)
‘"I know a teleconference is unusual,” I say in response to Drummond’s last comment, “but it’s necessary.”
Sarah Layton cuts in, her voice like a scalpel. “There’s nothing in your report to warrant it.”
“Not everything’s in my report,” I tell them. “I didn’t have time to bring it up to date.”
“Well?” That from hound-dog McMartin.
“The Star’s penetrated.” I say it flatly, for maximum effect. “Your data integrity’s compromised.”
The three exchange glances, and by the way their eyes move I realize Layton and Drummond are in the same room, while they’re talking to McMartin by phone. Their faces and eyes don’t show any shock, but all three are hardened professionals who won’t let emotion mar their unshakable façades.
“How?” Layton wants to know.
So I tell them. I've already described the delegation from the Tir corp in the report, but I add Nicholas Finnigan’s mysterious visitors from my “IrreleCorp.” I don’t have to point out the significance of the fact that IrreleCorp (or whoever) knew about Finnigan and guessed I’d turn to him for help—I can see it in the combined gaze of six very steady, very perceptive eyes.
When I’m finished there’s silence for a moment, then McMartin wants to know, “You’re sure you didn’t tell anybody else?” From the glances the other two shoot him, it’s obvious they consider even this amount of confirmation redundant. Pros—definitely pros.
But I reassure him on the point anyway. “Like I said, nobody. Just you, in one of my regular reports. You’ve been penetrated.”
“Yes,” Layton says slowly.
And realization strikes like a bullet. “You know,” I blurt out.
I can almost hear the steel shutters slam shut behind three pairs of eyes. Faces go expressionless, like robots.
They know. What I’m telling them is yesterday’s news. If anything, it’s confirming something they’d hoped wasn’t true ... or maybe proving that the penetration they’ve already discovered is more far-reaching than they initially feared. Frag. I want all the details, but I know better than to ask for them. These three are very much into need-to-know, and I don’t or they’d have told me already.
So I set the whole thing aside, and come back to my main reason for calling. “I want to come into the light.” (A hundred years back, I’d probably have said “in from the cold.”)
There’s no exchange of glances this time, there’s no need for it. A brain-dead trog would have figured it out from the drek in my report. The White Flash nods his head slowly, and I see that he’s the spokesperson for this part of the conference. “That is . .. understandable,” he allows. “Understandable, but impossible at the moment.”
“Why?” I ask. Not chill, not pro, but by frag I want to know.
If anything, his face goes even more cold-fish. “You know I can’t discuss that with you,” he tells me.
Frag this need-to-know bulldrek! That’s what I want to say, but I keep it buttoned. What I actually say is, “I find that hard to accept,” in a chill, steel-hard voice that sounds scary to my own ears.
But old Drummond isn’t fazed in the slightest. “Acknowledged,” he says with a curt nod. “Yet the facts are the facts. We can’t be seen reacting to .. . certain events ... in any way.” that’s enough of a clue for me to fill the rest in mentally. The Star has big trouble of some kind, and these three know it. Maybe it’s limited to the data penetration I thought I was cuing them to. But maybe the penetration is only a little piece of a bigger picture (charming thought). Whatever, the corp’s senior suits—including Layton, Drummond, and McMartin, but almost certainly not limited to them—are doing everything they fragging can to keep the lid on. They can’t let out the slightest hint that anything at all is out of the ordinary.
Hint to who? Lots of people, chummer—there are lots of people interested in finding chinks in the Lone Star armor, for whatever reason. Start with the Cutters themselves—and every other gang in the city. Ditto the yaks, the Cosa Nostra, the Seoulpa rings, the triads, the tongs ...
Toss the megacorps into the mix, too, for diverse reasons. Most corps view Lone Star as an enemy or rival. If they’re into illegal drek, they’d be thrilled to find a weakness or other kind of lever against the cops chasing them. And even if some corps aren’t into illegal drek, they’re still in competition—in one way or another—with the big business combine that is Lone Star Security Corporation (Knight Errant comes immediately to mind).
Now check out the political ramifications. The Star holds a contract with the Seattle metroplex government to provide police services to the city, neh? How would the government—in the person of cranky Governor Marilyn Schultz, for example—react to information that the Star has some big fragging hole in its data security or anywhere else? It’s business, omae. I don’t know what the metroplex government pays the Star each year for services provided, but if said government can shave a couple of points off the contract because it knows the Star's hurting, it'll sure as drek do it.
Besides, Governor Schultz is a politico, and politicos have enemies. What kind of edge would it give one of Schultz’s rivals if he found out—and could prove—that good old Marilyn had put the policing of the entire metroplex in the hands of a corporation that’s fundamentally fragged-up? You got that, omae, a big fragging edge. If word of that got out, how might Schultzy react? By coming down hard and showing she’s got jam, by re-negotiating the contract with the Star, or axing it once and for all.
Yeah, I think I get why Drummond and the rest of the suit squad are trying to keep the lid on the garbage can bolted down real tight. But it doesn’t make me feel any better at the moment.
“I scan it,” I tell Drummond, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring me in. Frag, my cover�
��s blown, that’s reason enough, isn’t it? There doesn’t have to be any connection— any connection at all—with the data penetration or any other drek. I’m hung out to dry out here.”
For an instant I think I see something that might almost, maybe, be empathy and understanding in the White Flash’s steely eyes. Then it’s gone. “Acknowledged,” he says again, “but still unacceptable. For reasons I’m not going to discuss on a non-sterile line. Think it through, Larson. You’ll understand.”
I nod slowly. I think I do understand, and that understanding makes the creeping feeling down my spine even colder and stronger.
I jumped to a big conclusion, didn’t I? That Mr. Nemo made me, and that’s why my cover’s blown and the Cutters want my cojones for paperweights. Make sense, sure it does. And if that’s the case, the White Flash has no reason not to pull me in.
But look at it from another angle, and try this on for size. My cover was blown, yes, but not by Mr. Nemo. Sure we recognized each other, but it was because he was standing in line waiting to get in the last time I got tossed out of Club Penumbra or some fragging thing. He didn't tell Blake I was a Star op, because he didn’t know.
So, apart from someone who recognizes me and knows I'm with the Star, who could hose my cover? Why, someone rifling through the Lone Star secure database with his ghostly electronic fingers, that’s fragging who. Makes perfect sense ... I think. Or am I missing something here?
Frag, I’ll worry about that later. Worry about all the little paranoid twists and intrigues when I’m not walking the streets waiting to see who it is who eventually gets to geek me. The fact of the matter is that the Star isn’t going to bring me into the light, not right now, and I’ve got to work around that fact.
Lone Wolf Page 10