by Carl Sargent
She'd done her job and it was nearly closing time at the shop. Manoj was tired and irritable after a hard day getting a lot less joy out of his trade than usual. He just wanted to get the frag out and sit down to some pickled fish and rice. This stupid slitch was a pain in the butt, and he said so.
"Ain't got no fax machine," he yelled at her.
"Yes you have. I heard you tell Nasrah last week," Kristen said triumphantly. "You told him about it like you'd just jazzed the prettiest girl in Sisulu!"
"Yeah, well that sure ain't you!" he grumbled, throwing a fake slap at her. She ducked the deliberately mis-aimed swipe. "Look, don't you go telling nobody. If the wrong people hear, it gets stolen. I can't afford another bust-in."
His key ring chinked as he attended to a padlock beneath the counter. Pulling out a heavy paneled drawer, he bent over to switch on the fax. Lights glowed on the console.
"Now, what you want to say?" he growled. "Keep it short. And I'm charging you, mind. Costs you by the second."
"Just say, um, Dear Sir "
She tried to parrot something from formal letters she had read aloud. Like the one that informed her the City Council was discontinuing her social security payments because she'd been caught begging and hawking. That one had been a real hoser.
"Quit the fancying around. Every word costs money. Keep it short, like I said."
"Okay. Say, 'I seen your name in a list from a computer of a slag got killed. Two other people on the list are ilready dead.''
"What?" he said sharply.
"Look, zip it. I know it's only one dead, but this way he might listen to me. Besides, it could be two by now, for all we know. Hell, it could be all of them!" Manoj didn't even bother to point out that they didn't know that anyone had been killed at all; the name he'd recognized was that of a kidnap victim. But time was short and the girl was determined. He knew the look.
"All right. I'm typing that in," he said needlessly as his fingers flew across the keyboard. "Now what?"
"Please call me on what's your number, Manoj?"
"No you don't," he said firmly. "This is nothing to do with me. No way."
"Please!"
"Frag off. I said no."
She hissed and spat at him, but he wouldn't be budged. He'd got himself a machine with a re-route function, making it hard to trace anything back to him, and he wasn't going to give that away by giving out his code.
"Look, Kristen, why don't you just say you'll call him again this time tomorrow and give him a number then? That gives you time to find a public phone or something. Best thing to do."
"All right," she agreed weakly. What did she know about his drek? She could just about handle a telecom, tapping in numbers whose position on the console keys she'd learned by heart. But typing in letters? That would be impossible.
He finished the message and pressed the Send button. A few seconds later, the machine let him know the fax had been safely received.
"There, it's done. Go and make me some kaf and then you're out," he said grumpily.
"I can't sleep here tonight?" she said miserably. "Slot, I'm so tired. And I've been running your number all day. Come on, chummer."
"All right," he sighed, locking the drawer again, looking at her suspiciously. "Just don't try fooling with this, hear? No trying to pick the lock and fragging it up."
"Me? Pick locks?"
Manoj hadn't been sure whether she could or not, but that wide-eyed innocent look she was giving him was a
dead giveaway. If it didn't have to do with something she'd already done, then it was something she was thinking of doing.
"Why are you doing this, girl?" he asked her as they sipped their soykaf, the front door locked and the shutters pulled down. "This slag in Seattle. What's it to you?" "I don't know," she said truthfully. "Is it a bit like, you girls get a crush on a rocker sometimes? See posters spread all around and fall in love with him? Or those girls thinking that some song has the words written specially for them?"
"Maybe it's a bit like that," she mused. She hadn't really thought it through. Thinking through her feelings wasn't one of Kristen's sharper skills.
It was at that moment that the first sledgehammer smashed through the back door. Manoj hadn't yet pulled the metal bars down: it was always the last thing he did before leaving the shop. Instantly, he dropped to his knees and pulled at something covered in sacking at the very base of the counter. Kristen saw him drag out the antiquated shotgun even as she was pulling the knife from her bag.
The door splintered off its hinges. Two of the gang almost fought their way through it, but Manoj caught them both with the first barrel. One slumped forward, the left side of his body streaming blood. The other one fell screaming back into the darkness.
"You fraggin' scum. You want the other barrel?" Manoj shrieked. There were still figures out there in the street that was dark as pitch. They must have knocked out the street lights before hitting the shop.
The butterfly knife whirled in from the darkness to hit him in the side of the throat. Kristen screamed as Manoj staggered backward, blood dappling the trinkets and brooches, the angular face of the ribboned Xhosa mask on the wall almost comically bisected with a thick red line. She knew Manoj was mortally wounded when he fired the second barrel, something he would do only if he had nothing left to lose. She bolted for the stairs, with just enough time to grab her little bag, wrap a cloth around her hand, and smash the single small window in the room.
The street was five meters below, but just as Kristen was struggling to force her way through the groaning frame, she felt rough, hard hands gripping her legs. With a mighty effort of will, she just managed to draw one knee forward and then kick backward with every bit of her strength. The kick hit hard, followed by the sound of a pleasing groan, but she overbalanced and toppled downward even as the hands released her. Rushing up to meet her was the pale stone of the street.
10
The old monastery nestling amid the conifers was truly beautiful. Even in the summer, misty haze swam around it from the ferns and grass, saturated by mid-afternoon rain and now gleaming in the evening sunlight. The Rolls-Royce purred along the gravel drive, throwing up a splatter of stones. As the car came to a halt outside the building's arched rear doors, two men in blue suits stepped out of the shadows almost in synchrony. One of them, darker and smaller than the other, entered the monastery as the door opened before him. His fellow joined the peak-capped chauffeur busily making preparations to deal with the occupant of the auto's customized rear seat.
"His Grace will see you now," the butler said to the dark-haired man, who ignored him and stepped up to the library doors, where he knocked and waited for the familiar voice from within. The summons soon followed.
He entered and went over to stand before the figure seated at a desk in front of huge arched windows completely covered with heavy drapes. Luther sat browsing through a dusty tome in the candlelight he always favored here. His entirely bald head lifted almost imperceptibly. He stared at his returning servitor, as if silently bidding him make his report.
"It is done, Your Grace. Lothar will be making the preparations now. Everything went perfectly, sir."
"Good, Martin." Even just those two words betrayed the strangeness of his voice. The inflection of the name was subtly wrong, somehow, but any listener would have had difficulty pinpointing exactly how. The words came as if from some voicesynth that fell just short of perfect
only because its maker had deliberately not completed the final adjustments.
"I have missed you," Luther said, letting the book slip from his hands.
Martin Matthaus felt a wave of relief ripple through his body. In more than a century of serving this great man, these words were the closest to anything resembling sentiment he'd ever heard him utter. It was more than he deserved.
"There is much work to be done," Luther said simply. He stood up, running his hands with their crooked fingers back across his brow and pointed ears, smoothing his sl
eek skull. "You must take care of the downloading from the Nongoma field trials. I need the last of the data tomorrow. It is regrettable that I was forced to take such drastic measures."
Panic began to well up in Martin. As yet, Luther had not punished anyone for the bungled kidnapping. He must be biding his time. Martin hadn't been part of that, but he knew perfectly well that once Luther's icy rage had built to the point of physical action, he would delight in adding caprice to his sadism. And, after Heidelberg, Luther's anger would be growing. Two serious failures in a month would call for a victim, maybe more than one. The crucial moment would come when Luther had fed, when his energies were high and he burned. But then, surely, Martin would be at one with the computers and databases and Luther would not come looking for him.
"When you're done, return here," Luther said forbiddingly, his tone momentarily increasing Martin's anxiety. Fortunately, his next words allayed those fears.
"I think we shall have to monitor the Americans," Luther went on. "I doubt they will do anything out in the open yet. But they may well send some kind of spy. Most likely, they'll try to deck into our matrix systems. I wish to review the security with you."
"Yes, Your Grace," Martin replied gratefully. It would mean more work, but it would also keep him safe, not least because he would be able to lock himself into the computer laboratory and justify his seclusion on security grounds. The locks wouldn't stop Luther, of course, but if
he came after Martin in fury they might slow him down enough to cool his rage. Martin knew all the signs of a frenzy building in Luther, and he could see a mighty one coming over him this night.
"Will that be all for now, Your Grace?" he said hopefully. Luther dismissed him with a wave of a hand. Martin bowed as he left, then scuttled away down to the old crypts.
Luther coughed drily, smoothed his suit and adjusted his black tie. He had a funeral to go to, after all.
Michael came around, trolls hammering on the anvil that was his head, just as the door opened. Serrin and Tom found him on his knees, still trying to get to his feet. His eyes were bloodshot and his pallor deathly. Tom raced to help him, hauling the limp body up under the arms, lifting him with ridiculous ease.
"Don't make a song and dance about it, old boy," Michael joked weakly. He felt the healing hands of the shaman gripping him, power flowing through the troll. The weakness faded, and the pain in his head dulled to a throb rather than the violent pulsing with which he'd awakened. He took a deep breath and shook his head to clear his senses.
"I'm all right. My software for automatically taking me out of the circuit has to be the best on the planet," he said. "Crikey, but that system was running some serious 1C. There must be something they really didn't want me to find. Now let's see what that is."
"Wait a minute," Serrin said. "Take a rest. You've only just come around. Get some coffee down you first."
Michael shook his head. "I don't need to deck in again. All I have to do is use Norman through the I/O and download it." Serrin and Tom smiled at each other.
"Don't you think that giving names to your frames is a bit, um, eccentric?" Serrin chuckled. "It's not as if they were real people, you know."
"They've got more personality than some allegedly real ones I know," Michael snorted. "Especially in New York. Of course it's eccentric. I'm bloody English, after all. I'm supposed to be eccentric; it's in my contract." Sit
ting himself down, he began tapping in his instructions through an ordinary console, the wires from the Fairlights now unattached and dangling.
Printouts churned from the array of machinery as Serrin made his choice between Kenyan and Costa Rican. The African blend seemed more appropriate somehow. By the time he carried the tray into the room, Michael had generated yards of facts and figures. As he scanned through them eagerly, his face became more and more perplexed.
"I don't understand this. Half this drek is irrelevant. They beat my browse program! All I managed to collect was a pile of junk. Oh great, some Umfolozi schoolkid reported missing by concerned parents. What is this drek? And why would anyone want to go to such trouble to coat it in 1C?"
He sat back, eyes cast up toward the ceiling. Serrin could almost see the neurons firing.
"There has to be a buried codesort in this. No way would a database lump all this stuff together. There has to be some limbo coding or something," he muttered.
Tom shot Serrin a puzzled look by way of a question. Serrin gave him his best "I don't know what the frag he's talking about" look by way of a reply.
They couldn't stop the Englishman from jacking back in, distrusting his smart frames now, after their initial failure. Five minutes later, he jacked out with a big smile on his face. The printout churned out just three entries.
"Cunning little code. Uses a recursive " Seeing the looks on their faces, he stopped short. "Ah, sorry. Let's just say it's cute, as you seps would put it."
"Seps?" Tom asked, just the hint of annoyance rising in his ocean-deep voice. He was unfamiliar with the English slang term for Americans. Serrin, knowing the derivation, didn't think the troll would take it too well. It wasn't what anyone would call complimentary.
"It's not important right now," the elf muttered.
"Interesting. Two of these kidnappings date from 2054 and, according to Zulu intelligence reports, have clear corporate links. But I don't think that's what we're after. Corporate abductions of company men aren't what we're
dealing with. Which leaves us only one. Exactly, um, twenty-three days ago. An attempted kidnap of a mage named Shakala in the Umfolozi Domains. Crikey. That's serious business."
"What are the Umfolozi Domains?" Tom asked fretfully. He couldn't follow half of what Michael was saying, but the Englishman always seemed to enjoy giving the details when he asked.
"Natural environment. An old wildlife reserve. Ever since the Awakening, it's become largely undisturbed terrain occupied by paranimals and semi-nomadic tribes. A lot of metahumans among them. Thing is, the mages among those people are powerful. Trying to kidnap one of them seems an extraordinary risk. Far more dangerous than trying to snatch Serrin off the streets of Heidelberg."
"So why do it?" Serrin queried.
"Good question, but one I can't answer right now. For one thing, I want to see what else the frames may have dug out of the other databases. For another, there aren't any notes in this file which might account for it. The intelligence analysis says there's no evidence of corporate involvement. The attempted abduction was, apparently, filed as a report by a government mage who just happened to be conducting some astral surveillance in the right place at the right time. No profiles of the kidnappers, though. Curses."
"You shouldn't call them 'the frames'," Serrin whispered with a smirk. "The children might be listening."
Michael ignored him and made preparations for plowing through the rest of his data. A beep from something in Serrin's jacket pocket startled him, and he groped for the downloader. Depressing the display button, the elf read the message while Michael looked on expectantly.
"There's a fax for me back in Seattle," he said. "I have a message forwarding number. If there's something there, it lets me know."
"Expecting anything?" Michael asked.
"Not really. Let's look into it so I can read it off. I could do it line by line on the screen, but if it's a long message, that'd be really tedious."
Michael had the short message printed out in seconds.
He handed it to Serrin without looking. The elf read the words and turned even paler than usual. He passed the sheet back to Michael without comment.
The Englishman then read the message aloud for Tom's benefit. Not sure whether or not the troll could read, he didn't want to embarrass him into having to admit it. The shaman took note of that.
" 'I seen your name in a list from a computer owned by a slag got killed. Two other people on the list are already dead. I will call you at this time tomorrow and give you a telecom code to contact me.' No name, no ID
. There's an incoming fax number, obviously."
"I'm getting rather paranoid about anonymous messages," Serrin said.
"Let's trace the incoming number," Michael said, repairing to his array of machinery to begin his trawling.
Serrin and Tom didn't talk much during the brief time Michael conducted his electronic search. They'd had enough time for that over coffee and Serrin's cigarettes in the restaurant. The elf knew Tom was unhappy in this strange city, disliking it greatly. He was no street shaman, and even if he had been, he wouldn't have liked the streets of Manhattan. His only comment was that the place lacked any heart or kindness.
"Rerouted, of course," Michael said with a gleam in his eye when he was done. 'The original message was sent from Cape Town. Now, that's a coincidence, isn't it? Two shots at the Confederated Azanian Nations inside ten minutes. I'm tracing the address and the owner now. Ah, here we are." He worked on as he talked, his frames doing the donkey labor. "Now, let's see what we can find out about Mr. Manoj Gavakar. Obviously, he's a Cape Indian, but is he a mage or is he amp; " His voice trailed away.
"What've you got?" Serrin asked quickly.
"The message was sent nine hours ago. Mr. Gavakar's premises were burned to the ground within an hour of that. His body, or rather a body assumed to be his since it's in such a state that ID is pending, was found inside. That's in the public newsnet, so it isn't classified information."
Serrin looked at the Englishman, horrified by the implications of this information. Tom was leaning forward, hunched, thinking. Up to now, the troll had been operating purely in response to Serrin's paranoia. He hadn't felt really involved. But this was closer to the bone. Being present through all these developments made him feel that something was surely going on after all.
"Makes me think of that old saying: Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not out to get you," the troll said.