The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  “Huh?”

  “A few data grenades, crashing the optical memory, burning hardcopy—couldn’t leave anything for the Fed. Fortunately, the most vital data I have is backed up in a safe deposit box in Switzerland.”

  “Of course.” She took her hand off her forehead and looked out the window. The Rover had stopped bumping, and she saw why. They were now racing through Bayview. The streets were nearly empty, and as she looked out the window, the Rover passed a burning drugstore.

  It’s everywhere, she thought.

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Once our travel arrangements were set, I thought I owed you at least one attempted contact.” Mr. K reached over and pulled something from behind the top button of Angel’s androgyne jacket. It was small and round.

  “You planted a bug on me?” Damn it, that might have gotten me killed, especially on Alcatraz.

  “Not really a bug. It doesn’t emit any EM signal unless I am within a rather short range with the proper tracking device.” He patted a comm unit built into the back of the front seats. “Forgive the imposition, but you are valuable and worth keeping track of.”

  “So that let you find me?”

  “Well, it seemed likely that you’d be at the game. Once on Hunter’s Point we’d be in range for this. Unfortunately, we were late, and the riot broke even as we reached the gate. We barely made it to the Rover, and I’ve never been more thankful for this thing’s armor.” He patted the wood paneling, as if it was a pet.

  She wondered how many other people knew she was at that game. She’d been pretty damn predictable. Now what? She had intended to take a flight out of the country—

  “What travel arrangements?”

  “Ah, that’s why we wanted to contact you. I have a private plane ready to leave for Rome.”

  “Rome?”

  “Yes, we did get a look at the mass of data TECHNOMANCER downloaded to us. Your data is much too volatile to market in the States safely, but the sociological methods implicit in the data are of interest to some of our European clients. We offer you passage.”

  Rome? Why the hell not? The EEC was at least as good as the States were for moreaus, ever since the pope decided they had souls. “I don’t have a passport.”

  Mr. K chuckled. “I don’t even have a legal identity. You’ll come?”

  She nodded. Leaving, what a good idea. For a while she watched the city pass by as the Land Rover drove north. Pillars of smoke rose everywhere. Crowds of moreys and crowds of humans ran along the streets smashing windows, overturning cars, and throwing rocks that bounced off the Rover.

  San Francisco had turned into a madhouse.

  “When do you leave?”

  “The plane’s at Alameda fueled and ready to go. I’ve given everyone until six-thirty to get to the field. I hope the riot doesn’t complicate matters.”

  Six-thirty at Alameda, barely an hour to get to Oakland and the airfield.

  What was she worried about? It was Tetsami’s plane. They wouldn’t leave without him.

  She knew what it was. She still had the damn tickets.

  Not only that, everyone knew she had the damn tickets.

  She’d been in the middle of a firelight between Governor Gregg and President Merideth ever since she laid hands on the things—and Merideth, at least, could reach beyond the States if he wanted to. He had the whole Fed to work with. If she could just dump it so they’d stop going after her.

  How?

  Wait a minute—

  She pulled the tickets out of her pocket. “I’m getting rid of an albatross.”

  • • •

  For some reason, she thought it would be harder. After all, it shouldn’t be easy to arrange a personal meeting between a nobody moreau and a presidential candidate in the middle of a riot. Even if the candidate was a novelty third party one like Sylvia Harper.

  It turned out to be more difficult to convince Mr. K to let her do it than it was to get the appointment. She had to push the fact that it was her data to begin with, that he’d already sold his cut, and he had already decided against marketing it in the States.

  When the Land Rover’s comm—in the back seat, high class—found the Harper people at the new Hyatt Regency, the campaign people made an immediate appointment for Angel. As if they’d been waiting for her call.

  All she could think was that Harper remembered her from arranging her field trip to Alcatraz. That should have told her something, but all she could think of was the fact that giving this data to Harper would seriously screw with Gregg, Merideth, and the other big-boy politicos who had been screwing with this here rabbit.

  The New Regency was an imposing gloss-black monolith that hugged the coast by Sacramento. Transparent elevators slid along the outside of the sloping walls. When the Rover pulled up next to the curb, Mr. K put a hand on her shoulder.

  “We can only wait for twenty minutes. We have to get across to Oakland before the curfew hits.”

  Or the riot, Angel thought. The only sign of the violence here was the smell of smoke, and the sirens in the distance. The area immediately around the Regency was empty and silent.

  “This should only take a few minutes,” she said. As she stepped out, she could see that there was only a sliver of daylight remaining. The sky was a light purple, and the smoke in the air was hastening the arrival of dusk.

  As she walked to the entrance of the Regency, three fire engines blew by, sirens blaring.

  The pink security guard manning the reception desk—the only one there—looked nervous at her approach. He didn’t stop sweating until he had the computer confirm her appointment and had taken her ID. He directed her to a private elevator that was guarded by a black-suited human whose bearing screamed Secret Service.

  She hadn’t thought third party candidates rated Service protection. But then, with Harper’s radical stand on moreau rights—nonhuman, Angel corrected herself—she needed it. The suit nodded, and the door slid aside for her.

  Harper was on the twenty-eighth floor. Not a room, her people had the whole floor. When the doors opened, another agent ran a metal detector over her and ushered her into a suite—and left her.

  The few minutes she had alone she looked out the window. She could see back into the city, a city already cloaked with a smoky haze. At this distance, the burning buildings looked like campfires.

  Harper walked into the room behind her. “Horrible, isn’t it?”

  Angel turned and nodded.

  “It will keep getting worse, you know.” Harper walked up to the window next to her. She was a tall black woman with long fragile bones. She moved with a confidence that convinced Angel that those bones were made of steel. “Until we have some equity not based on species.”

  Standing next to her, Angel could see how this was the voice that had been able to halt other riots, how this woman could walk into a place like the Bronx and not feel the fear a human should. There was something very hard there.

  Angel pulled the tickets from her pocket. “Senator Harper.”

  Harper turned and ebony eyes latched on Angel like a vise. “You said on the comm, you have something for the cause.”

  Angel nodded and handed over the ramcards. The act released a pressure that had been crushing her. After a week she could suddenly breathe again. She sucked in some air, about to explain what they were, but Harper was looking past the ramcards. She was shaking her head and muttering. “Amazing. So obvious—”

  The weight that had left, so briefly, was back now with a crushing intensity. Angel had a very bad feeling.

  Harper was looking up and smiling. “You have no idea how pleased I am that you did this voluntarily. The violence over these was becoming appalling.”

  “Oh, shit,” was all Angel managed to say.

  “You did the right thing—”

 
“Those moreys by VanDyne, on the bus—you?”

  A look of concern crossed Harper’s face. “You look like you need to sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.”

  Angel slipped into an overstuffed Hyatt easy chair and Harper handed her a tumbler of amber fluid.

  “I am very sorry for what they did. You have to understand, they were all I had. NOA doesn’t have the assets of the Constitutionalists or the Democrats, or even the Greens. Merideth has the entire security community, Gregg has all the state mechanisms under his thumb. All we have is the Committee for NonHuman Affairs. The only operatives we have are NonHumans liberated when United American was seized—”

  Angel nodded, trying not to listen. She’d been too stupid. Of course the moreaus were Harper’s. Harper had been the only one who knew Angel was going to Alcatraz.

  Harper was still explaining things. “—was inevitable. He refused to hand over the information except for an obscene amount of money. He was going to sell it to Gregg. Can you imagine?” For the first time Harper’s voice held real anger. “He was going to sell it to Alexander Gregg, who has barely stopped short of advocating nonhuman genocide. If Gregg came to the White House, the Knights of Humanity would write the platform for the nation.”

  Harper walked to the window and looked out at the fires. “I’m the only one who can stop this.”

  The bolt of déjà vu was like a knife. Briefly, she could see a white blubbery form that smelled of ammonia and bile. The end justifies the means—I was wrong, that attitude isn’t almost human. It is human. Very human.

  Angel stood up. For one brief shining moment, she thought she would kill Harper. Slam the political twitch through the window and watch as she tumbled twenty-eight stories. She had taken a step toward Harper when sanity intervened.

  All she wanted to do was get out of here. Away from Harper, away from this city, away from this country—

  The last thing she heard Harper say was, “—if there’s anything we can do for—”

  Then the door slammed shut.

  Chapter 30

  Andre was trying to call her again, but she didn’t answer his page. Most of the time, his fussiness in maintaining the Naples estate was laudable. At the moment, however, it was just plain irritating. Angel didn’t want to hear how the techs were spooling cable through the kitchen, or how heavy equipment was gouging the parquet—

  Of course, she could have gone up the coast to Tetsami’s main headquarters. However, she only had one bit left to feed him, and she was going to get as much out of it as she could. She’d been waiting over a year for this and it was going to go down here—home. Besides, the remote didn’t cost Tetsami that much more.

  And, for him, for what Angel was going to give him—the remote terrorist run was going to be cheap.

  She flipped through her old sheaf of news faxes. They were in Italian, so she only read the headlines. Her language wasn’t that good yet—

  “USNF 12-15-59: GREGG DENIES KNIGHTS’ INVOLVEMENT”

  “USNF 12-20-59: ATTORNEY GENERAL ANNOUNCES INDICTMENT OF CONSTITUTIONALIST COMMITTEE CHAIR”

  “USNF 2-10-60: GREGG STEPS DOWN”

  “USNF 2-11-60: NOA REACHES RECORD 20% IN CALIFORNIA”

  “USNF 3-20-60: SERGEI NAZARBAEV ENDORSES HARPER, RETIRES FROM FOOTBALL”

  “USNF 4-17-60: SPECIAL GRAND JURY DECLARES KOBE ANAKA LONE GUNMAN”

  Angel chuckled at that one. She wondered what Anaka would think if he knew he was the linchpin of a whole new crop of conspiracy theories.

  “USNF 5-23-60: GENERAL GURGUEIA TO MEET WITH NONHUMAN COMMITTEE”

  That was Harper’s first coup. She had managed to get to meet with the violent antihuman leader of the Moreau Defense League. Angel noted cynically that the “NonHuman” committee was composed entirely of humans.

  There was an incidental mention of intra-Bronx violence. Apparently a group of canines and felines—wolves and cougars? Angel shrugged—had been stirring up trouble in the Bronx, wasting the MDL leadership.

  Gurgueia denied that that was the reason the MDL had decided to talk now.

  “USNF 6-5-60: TRUCE DECLARED, MARTIAL LAW LIFTED FROM LA, BRONX”

  That was coup number two. It happened shortly after an unidentified feline assassinated Gurgueia. The death of the general received only minor press.

  “USNF 7-18-60: NOA ANNOUNCES NONHUMAN VICE PRESIDENT, DROPS TEN POINTS”

  All the pundits thought Harper had killed herself when she had a morey get on the platform. A rabbit, no less. Needless to say, Harper knew exactly what she was doing.

  “USNF 9-10-60: NOA LEADS DEMOCRATS BY FIVE POINTS”

  Merideth had managed to shoot himself in the foot several times when talking about the NOA vice presidential candidate. His campaign died when a recording of racist comments surfaced, smearing Harper and the VP nominee. Something crude like “Harper, fucking like a bunny.” No one believed it when Merideth said the tape was a computer-generated forgery.

  Harper had never looked back from that.

  The most recent headline had come in this morning. She put the sheaf down on her desk and read it.

  “USNF 1-20-61: HARPER TAKES OATH OF OFFICE”

  One of the techs walked in and said something in rapid Italian.

  “English, still,” she said. “I’m working on it.”

  “Oh,” said the human tech. “I am here to fetch you.”

  “Everything’s ready, then?”

  “All is ready.”

  Angel followed the tech out and down the broad staircase. They walked along, following cables that snaked into the Ballroom. The Ballroom had been set up with a dozen computer techs, and a like number of remote terminals. In the back, Tetsami was putting on an odd-shaped helmet in front of a dynamic holo display.

  Andre stood in a corner, looking like he was about to cry.

  Angel walked up and seated herself at a vacant comm terminal stationed next to Tetsami’s desk. The frank only went by Tetsami now. Unlike his last base of operations, the government here was very friendly.

  The look on Tetsami’s face was one of predatory excitement. Angel had known that he’d been salivating after TECHNOMANCER’s backdoor ever since they’d left the States. The trick, of course, was that only Angel could use it. She knew of at least one attempt that Tetsami had made. It’d been a dismal failure. The Fed had done quite a bit to tutor TECHNOMANCER on proper security procedures.

  Tetsami thought that the Fed’s security procedures might actually reinforce Angel’s BS. He’d been willing to pay handsomely to have her help them go in. At this point, however, Angel could give a shit about money.

  Her price was much more complicated, and it took a long time to get Tetsami to go along with her.

  “Everything set?” Angel asked.

  “We are ready to punch the hole.”

  Angel nodded and a speaker began squawking. “One minute to satellite uplink.”

  The whole process was familiar. The only difference was that the last time they called on VanDyne’s mainframe they didn’t have to bounce the signal over the ocean.

  Eventually, a familiar bubbly voice called over the speakers. “Authorization is required immediately.”

  TECHNOMANCER seemed to be a little more security conscious. “It’s okay. I’m Angel, the rabbit, remember?”

  “Your access is logged. You have authorization and clearance.”

  Tetsami was right, the BS she’d fed the thing had stuck. “What clearance do I have?”

  “TIPPY-TOP SECRET.”

  A lot of the techs, who had been there during the first contact, cheered. Angel allowed herself a little smile. “I am going to hand you over to a lot more people, they all have my access. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are to answer their questions and do what they say.�
�

  The techs sprang into activity as the U.S. Government’s most powerful computer opened its soul to them. While the techs conducted their data orgy, she made an international call on the comm at her station.

  From Tetsami’s estimates, it would take the Fed ten minutes to realize something was wrong, another four or five to trace the signal and cut it. Since the team wasn’t in the States, they could ride it right down to the wire.

  With what Tetsami knew, there was no way the EEC was going to extradite him, or anyone involved with him.

  Besides, when Angel was done, the Fed would have a lot more to worry about.

  It was bright daylight in Naples. In San Francisco it was close to midnight. However, Pasquez was an anchor now, and he did the night news. He was there when her call came into BaySatt.

  A look of shock crossed his perfect Hispanic features when he saw her. She had picked him because he was the one reporter who’d recognize her. “Lopez. Angelica Lopez!”

  “Good. I see they’ve taken you off the street.”

  “I anchor the national desk—Christ, you disappeared back in November. Before the riots. I did a series on your disappearance.”

  “One of the reasons Gregg went belly up, I hear.”

  “Financing the Knights of Humanity wasn’t very popular. Where have you been?”

  “Hiding out—” In the background there were more cheers from the techs.

  “We leeched it.”

  “The program’s holding.”

  “The thing is actually going to do it.”

  “We’re withdrawing. It’s TECHNOMANCER’s show now.”

  The speaker by Tetsami started a new countdown. “One minute until TECHNOMANCER.”

  Angel turned to Tetsami, holding a finger to the screen to quiet Pasquez, “They can’t stop it, can they?”

  “Only if the Fed can afford to chop the only outside line they have on their prize system. They have TECHNOMANCER wired into some vital systems now. I don’t think they can.”

  Pasquez was trying to get her attention. “What’s going on over there?”