Late on the evening of Saturday, May 2, after a stop in Kansas City to go through the new orientation materials 'Sieur Obodi had designed, Jimmy Ramirez flew a semiballistic into Los Angeles via LAX. He found the trip itself--quite apart from the business on which he had come to Los Angeles--rather exciting.
It was only the second time since escaping the Fringe that he had left the Greater New York area; and that first occasion had merely been a brief trip to Boston some two years prior.
He had never even been on a semiballistic before.
Los Angeles was very nearly as alien as he had expected; a billboard that greeted him upon debarking said:
WELCOME TO
TRANS-CON-FREE
LOS ANGELES
He picked up his single piece of luggage at the terminal, briefly toyed with and then rejected the idea of hiring one of the human-driven cabs. The lack of TransCon in Los Angeles meant that people could drive their own cars, if they wished; it did not mean that it was a good idea. Jimmy knew his own reflexes, excellent though they were, were no match for those of a carcomp's; the idea of entrusting his life to a driver whose reflexes were almost certainly worse than his own sounded suicidal, not exciting.
Not that he would have admitted it to anyone, but he was afraid of heights anyway.
Old Downtown was a fifteen-minute flight from LAX. Jimmy Ramirez, alone in the cab's back seat, made no pretense of sophistication; he stared out the windows at southwest Los Angeles, stopping every few minutes, when the heights got to him, to settle his nerves. Despite the carpet of lights stretching from one end of the horizon to the other, it all seemed, in some odd sense, curiously rural, and after a moment Jimmy placed it; Los Angeles lacked spacescrapers. Though he saw a few buildings that he guessed at one hundred or one hundred and fifty floors, surely none of them topped two hundred. He wondered briefly at the lack of spacescrapers, and then leapt to the reasonable conclusion that they had avoided building spacescrapers because of the danger of earthquakes. He was incorrect; a spacescraper with a base that covered two square blocks was quite safe from even the worst earthquake; it was no likelier to fall over than a small mountain. Los Angeles, in 2076, simply did not have the population density necessary to make a spacescraper capable of permanently supporting a populating of some 350,000 persons a necessity.
Los Angeles did sport one of the world's four uncompleted spacescrapers, begun, as the other three had been, over twenty years prior, before the Ministry of Population Control had finally succeeded in reversing Earth's explosive population growth.
The cabcomp's tourist program asked Jimmy if he wished to detour to see the shell of L.A.'s only spacescraper.
Jimmy Ramirez snorted. "No. I'm in a hurry. And I've damn straight seen a shell before."
The cabcomp did not try to speak to him again.
The cab came down atop a small black skyscraper in Old Downtown, fifty or sixty stories high. The skyscraper was the twin of another skyscraper immediately beside it.
The parking space the cab came down upon bore the legend, visible from the sky:
In Your Wildest Dreams Don't Even Think About Parking Here
On the wind-whipped roof, just beyond the row of floodlamps which illuminated the downlot, stood two men Jimmy Ramirez had never met before. Even before he got out of his cab he recognized them both, from Max Devlin's descriptions.
The tall one, blond hair gathered away from his face in a tight pony-tail, was 'Sieur Obodi, the man who had taken down Tommy Boone. The short, broader one would be Chris Summers, the only non-French Peaceforcer Elite the System had ever seen; the only Peaceforcer Elite who had ever deserted.
After Trent the Uncatchable, Christian J. Summers was, Jimmy knew, the most wanted fugitive in the System. Even Tommy Boone, when he had been alive, had never made it past number three on the PKF listing of fugitives.
The PKF did not actually make up a "most-wanted" list; they simply posted rewards.
Trent the Uncatchable's bounty was CU:5,000,000, at a time when the average cost of a day's labor, world-wide, hovered around CU:15.
Christian J. Summers was worth CU:3,500,000.
Summers came forward as the cab's fans died down, fanwash tugging at his clothes. He looked like exactly what he was, an early PKF Elite, from the days when the treatments which toughened the skin had also stiffened the face into a rigid mask. His handshake was dry and very hard.
"'Sieur Ramirez. A pleasure."
"Likewise."
"Come on." Summers led Jimmy across the windy ferrocrete surface of the roof, to where 'Sieur Obodi stood waiting for them.
Watching.
It was Jimmy's first impression of Obodi, of the man's eyes upon him as he approached. Even in the relative darkness atop the skyscraper, they gleamed, bright sparks of blue in a deeply tanned, apparently Caucasian face. His lips were thin, curved into a faint smile.
He took a single step forward as Jimmy Ramirez neared him, and held out his hand.
Coming from any other person Jimmy Ramirez had ever known in his life, 'Sieur Obodi's greeting would have sounded nothing but pretentious.
From Obodi it sent a chill down his spine.
"Welcome, James Ramirez," said 'Sieur Obodi, enfolding Jimmy's outstretched hand in both of his, a warm, seductive smile lighting his face, "welcome to your destiny."
At a distance of two kilometers, an avatar of Ralf the Wise and Powerful, safely ensconced in the circuitry of the cab Jimmy Ramirez had taken from LAX, circled around and around the Bank of America Building.
* * *
17.
Denice ran through the briefing materials for Australia on the semiballistic, while Ripper dozed.
There were advantages to not needing much sleep; if she had required as much sleep as Ripper, Denice did not know when she would ever have found the time to prepare for anything. When he was awake, Ripper was a full-time job.
Australia, the briefing began, yearns for respect.
Its post-Unification history has been one of significant accomplishment. It separated from the British Commonwealth in the years immediately before the Unification. Though the French PKF was, characteristically, brutal in its pacification of England, Australia fared better; like the French they resented the English, and further had a history of cordial relations with France stretching back to World War I. Though Australia was not among the founding Unification countries, Australia did not contest the Unification, and once the course of the Unification War was clear, made reasonable accommodations with Unification forces.
The Australians have become a significant factor in space travel; one of Earth's largest spaceports is located in the Australian outback.
Australia, despite its relatively small population, is a significant electoral resource; almost alone among modern democracies, Australia requires, on penalty of a stiff fine, that its citizens participate in all elections, both local and Unification. (It has gone to great lengths to make this feasible; it is one of the few countries in the Unification that has completely eliminated the ballot box in favor of Net based voting.) Given the forty-two percent turnout which characterizes Unification voters worldwide, this gives the Australian voter a say in Unification politics which is significantly out of proportion to the actual population of the Australian continent.
Native Australians have a distinct neurosis concerning the traditional lack of respect given their people by the outer world. Founded by England as a penal colony in 1788, and used so for the first eighty years of their existence, Australia possessed, until the end of the twentieth century, an insignificant voice in world politics.
Since the Unification, this has largely changed; but the erroneous impression, that they have insufficient say in how Australia is treated by the outer world, including the Unification proper, has remained, and is a sensitive subject.
Douglass Ripper traveled with a retinue of not less than a dozen people; depending on the locale to be visited, his party sometimes ran as high as twenty-fiv
e persons. Denice had been amazed, at first, by the size of his staff. On any given day she never saw more than a few or them; her first staff meeting had been a revelation. Over forty people had shown up: Ichabod, the Chief of Staff; two speech writers, a Director of Communications, a Net Access Coordinator, Election Committee Manager, Ripper's personal secretary, the secretary's secretary, the Deputy Assistant for Executive Branch Liaison--and people with a dozen other titles, and the secretaries and aides and assistants of those people.
It had been over a month before Denice had even gotten all the names straight.
For the India/Australia/Japan trip, Ripper had taken fifteen people with him; six were bodyguards.
Four of the bodyguards stayed with Ripper in their Canberra hotel room while Ichabod Martin and Denice examined the hall where Ripper was to speak. They went down together, two hours ahead of time.
They did not expect to find anything. The PKF Personal Security squads assigned to Councilor Ripper had marked the room clean that morning, and two different Australian security agencies had double-checked their work. The hall was a large rectangular area, about sixty meters wide, by eighty long, by perhaps six high. A single large double door stood at the south end of the hall, with two smaller doors at the east and west, near the raised speaker's platform.
A PKF Elite stood at each of the three doors.
They did not expect to find anything, but they had not expected to find anything in Portugal either--and therefore had checked Ripper's hotel room rather cursorily.
If the assassin had not exactly been hiding under the bed, he had not been far from it. Sometime during the night before Ripper's arrival in Portugal the assassin had checked into the room immediately beneath Ripper's, and cut a small hole through the ceiling and into Ripper's hotel room.
The fact that he was sleeping with Denice probably saved Ripper's life; they had been drifting off to sleep when a sound disturbed Denice.
She came awake in motion. She pushed Ripper hard, one handed, from the bed they shared, pushing herself in the other direction with the same movement. Her handgun, a sixteen-shot automatic with explosive shells, sat with a spare clip atop the dresser at the bedside and she reached for it with her left hand as she rolled backward away from the bed--
--the gun and the spare clip leapt from the dresser's surface, into her waiting hand. She came out of the roll, came to her feet firing.
The bed exploded in flame.
There were sixteen shots in the handgun and she wasted the clip into a spot on the floor. The clip ejected itself when empty and Denice
the bed is burning, a thin, sharp beam of ruby laser light waving up through the burning bed, stopping when it meets the ceiling above it, flames crawling up from the surface of the bed
slammed the spare home and fired again.
Ichabod and Bruce appeared in the hotel room's doorway, Excalibur laser rifles in hand; they made the correct decision, pulling Ripper from the hotel room without delay, leaving Denice behind to deal with the threat.
The second clip was empty.
The laser light had ceased.
Where she had fired into the floor the floor no longer existed. Denice could look straight down into the room beneath them, through a hole some half a meter wide.
In the room beneath a man lay sprawled flat on his back, looking up toward the ceiling, a laser rifle clutched in his right hand. She could not tell how badly injured he was, or if he was even conscious; but he was still alive, twitching and moaning and bleeding quite impressively.
Shattered pieces of the floor had cut Denice's legs in half a dozen places, and now the room sprinklers cut in, dousing the fire quickly, washing the blood down her thighs and calves.
Two weeks later, in Canberra, they did not expect to find anything.
Nonetheless they checked.
Denice started at the south end of the hall, carrying a small device that spat deep radar pulses at the walls, looking for odd signatures in the walls--hollow places, spots with unusual density. She ignored the PKF Elite, as the Elite ignored her. Ichabod started up at the north end around the speaker's platform, and worked south.
They met in the middle of the hall about an hour later, an hour before Ripper was due to come down to speak, and sat down together facing one another across the center aisle.
"The balcony area gets closed off?"
The bearded black features bobbed up and down. "Yeah. That shouldn't be a problem. I think we tell hotel security we're taking him down the south maglevs, and then use the north maglevs. We bring him in through the east door. That gives us the smaller part of the lobby to walk through; he won't be exposed to the street for as long as if we go through the main lobby."
Denice nodded. "Works for me."
"Okay. I think we have about ten minutes free. We need to talk."
"I know."
"How are you today?"
Denice looked straight at him. "Could be better, could be worse. I woke up last Tuesday morning feeling--" Denice paused. "Bad. Aching. I'm not sure why. That was five days ago, and it's lingered. Today I am, largely, clear and centered. How are you?"
"I'm having problems."
Denice nodded, waited.
Martin sighed. "Personal. You know Terry and I broke up."
"Shawmac? I knew you were dating."
Ichabod Martin said, "Things have not been good between us for a long time. Half a year, maybe. But we're both stubborn men and neither of us wanted to give up. Past couple of months--you know you tear each other up toward the end, so that it's easier to let go?"
"Is that how it's done."
Ichabod shrugged. "Different strokes, I suppose. So anyway, last night we talked for about an hour and decided not to see one another again."
"I am sorry."
"I don't mention it for the sympathy. But I'm not focused. I'm not going to be focused, not today. I talked to John and Bruce already. I haven't mentioned it to Councilor Ripper, and I'm not going to."
"I'll cover your back where I can."
"Appreciate it." Denice waited for what she knew was coming. Martin took a deep breath and said, "How long have you been sleeping with the Councilor?"
"About three months." Denice paused. "I thought you knew, until what happened in Portugal. The way you behaved afterward--that was when I realized you didn't."
Martin shook his head. "No. Perhaps I should have, but I sometimes don't see things other people might. The Councilor's always had his personal bodyguard stay in the room with him while he slept; but the Councilor's real straight, and his bodyguards in the past have always been men. When you started with us I worried about this, but I thought the Councilor was smart enough to refrain." He paused. "This disturbs me a lot. It's unprofessional behavior on your part, I don't think I have to tell you that."
"You don't. I know it."
Martin nodded, accepting it. "I'm more upset with him. Employers shouldn't sleep with their employees. It's bad policy. That he chose to--well, I'm going to speak to him about it. I've been dropping things lately--so have you--and it's left the Councilor tense enough that I've been reluctant to broach this subject with him. But I think I'm going to have to. He should have told me; it's relevant to my job. If he wishes to sleep with you, fine, but you need to cease working for him as a bodyguard."
A flicker of real anger touched Denice. "I don't think you're qualified to make that judgment."
"The Councilor will make the judgment; fortunately it's not my call. But I don't think you can be objective when the man you're protecting is also the man you're sleeping with. Do you?"
"I don't know."
"I don't think so. And I'm going to tell him so when this trip is done."
The anger faded; Denice said, "Thank you for the warning."
"You're welcome. Back upstairs?"
"Yeah."
On the way up, Denice said, "I hope things work out for you."
Ichabod nodded slowly. "I hope the same for you. The Councilor i
s a very complex man."
"Trust me. I know."
The speech went well. Denice barely listened to it; she stood at the east entrance, next to the young PKF Elite, and watched the crowd.
A small point immediately between her eyes, about a centimeter in, throbbed as though a white-hot iron spike had been driven in there.
She ignored it and watched the crowd burn.
The flames started at their fingertips, bright crawling sheaths of blue. They lit up like neon laser, made tracings of the nerve networks within the individuals she watched. The glowing blue strengthened as it flowed up toward their skulls, where it blossomed into something improbably reminiscent of the halo of a saint.
She did not hear the speech end, barely noticed Ripper when he passed by her on the way out of the hall. The genuine anger in his voice when he snapped, "Wake up," on his way by penetrated; she started after him, but he was already fifteen paces ahead of her, out in the east lobby.
If anyone had been waiting for him, Ripper would have died.
Up in the hotel room he exploded. "Damn it to hell, Daimara, you shouldn't be dropping things like this. I know you're better than this. In the last two months I haven't been able to depend on you, I haven't been able to depend on Ichabod, and I cannot travel without both of you! If I can't travel, I can't get elected. If I travel without complete faith in both of you--and right now I don't have that--I can't get up in front of a crowd without wondering if I'm going to have my fucking head blown off by some freaking Johnny Reb wannabe before I'm done speaking, and that tends to detract ever so slightly from my effectiveness as a speaker."
Denice nodded. "I know. It's just--" She made a helpless gesture. "I don't know. There's something wrong and I'm not sure what it is."
Ripper looked directly at her. "Is it us?"
"No." Her voice softened. "No. I love you, Douglass. You know that."
"That's not what I'm asking. Is your relationship with me making it impossible for you to do your job?"
Denice shook her head. "No."
"What, then?"
"I don't know. I think maybe I'm worried about my friend Jimmy."
The Last Dancer Page 14