by Dave Swavely
“He only twotted one time, and for only a few minutes,” he said, his body going stiff again as he looked at his files. “And he just sent it to a personal account, not the whole network … probably curious to see how it came across. But she never deleted them from her system.”
“She?” I asked.
“His last three payments before this were for a high-class escort, a hotel room, and a lot of expensive booze from their room service. Cross-referencing the records from the escort service yields the ID of the woman, and the history of her purchases reveals that she herself did not have implants but owned a pricey external rig, probably one of her prize possessions.” He stopped viewing his files and looked over at me. “My guess is they got liquored up, she discovered that he had never used Twotter and talked him into trying the rig. They decided he would think about his job … maybe random or maybe she wanted to know more about the inner workings of BASS, while his inhibitions were down. Who wouldn’t?”
“So he agreed to send the twots to her private account so he could view them,” I said. “And then she didn’t erase them … maybe because she has that hooker’s mindset of saving info for blackmail. In case she got into a desperate situation and needed something to leverage.”
“Could be,” he said, raising his eyebrows and nodding.
“Can you delete hers while I take a look at our copy?”
“I think so,” he said, and at my nod, he dived back into the net.
I tapped and moused my glasses until the text of D’s twot appeared, and chose the audio-accompaniment option. Now I really felt bad about this voyeuristic trip into my friend’s private life, but I also felt compelled to find out his unfettered thinking about the company, and to follow up on the possibility of information pertaining to the case. The Twotter software was designed to filter out completely random, unrelated thoughts and record only those that connected somehow with the previous topic, but it still contained some disorienting parentheses.…
Okay, think about my job, think about my job … I work for BASS, the BigASS we call it, when we don’t like something, not like yours, yours is … think about my job, okay, think about … BASS is Saul, Saul is BASS, he is amazing legendary iconic, old, scar, my head is itching, do you like this thing?, she can’t hear me … BASS, Saul is so different from what you would think, would rule this place, he is like an antique in so many ways, I don’t mean old, he is old, I mean antiquated with these old ideas, values, and in this place that was so … progressive, gay-rights capital and all, does she do women? she can’t hear me … but progressive, cats laws about cats, pets’ rights you name it … the only way the Mayor, Rabin, could ever run this city is if it was destroyed, going to be destroyed, he was the only way to stop, no atheists in foxholes, no atheists in an earthquake … atheists means no God no religion, he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve but it’s underneath, down deep, from his generation maybe, no he’s not that old, I hope she’s not underage, doesn’t matter, who’s going to arrest me, me? funny … I won’t arrest me, but why do I feel bad about it … Paul’s better, he’s religious too I think but not … intolerant, he doesn’t isn’t won’t judge us, he wouldn’t arrest me, Michael is not religious, British not, he’s married though, that might be better for Saul, he’s not better than me, why does the old man prefer him, because he’s white?… she’s white, I like white, she can’t hear me … could be a white thing, I don’t know, do I really know? white is an old idea too … but I shouldn’t think this way about him, he’s never done anything bad to me, it’s his money here, look at this room, look at her, look at her lips, what?… keep, your, eyes, closed, oh, okay … no, my head itches, I’m done.
There was nothing here pertaining to the murder case, but it was definitely interesting. I’d had no idea that D had suspicions about Saul Rabin, probably because he could never say them in his position, and I was even more surprised that he thought I had been favored by the old man. It sounded like D had found out that Saul was grooming me ahead of him, though I didn’t see why that would matter much to him, with Paul as the heir apparent to the throne. When the king eventually passed on, his son the prince would constitute his own court. Also interesting were D’s thoughts about the underlying beliefs, more palatable in the son than in the father, which brought my attention back to the Asian tech, who was now finished with his dive and staring at me.
“Did you get rid of her copy?” I asked him.
“It’s gone, far as east from west,” he answered. “That’s from the Bible, you know.”
“What?”
“That expression … our sins are sent away, as far as east from west.”
Riiiight, I thought, realizing that someone had indoctrinated this young man in one of the much-maligned religions that followed an ancient book as if it were true. I wondered if he was of the fringe variety who were hounded by activists because they thought only straight people were going to heaven. That viewpoint was about as popular as an enema with most people, and it could get you killed, because the only thing not tolerated in our culture was any form of intolerance. BASS had taken quite a bit of heat, in fact, because the Mayor had refused to prosecute such religious varieties, as long as they did not commit violence against others. I knew he had many old-fashioned ideas, but I was still a bit surprised that someone like him would be allowed to work here.
“Did you learn that at the Presidio?” I asked.
“Some … there were some believers there. More than you might think.” He winked, inexplicably. “But I was born and raised in South Korea.”
“Ohhh,” I said, nodding. Although his kind of fundamentalist faith had been on the decline for some time in North America, I knew it was still thriving in some other places around the world, especially in that beleaguered Asian country.
“Well, nice work on the file,” I said, then exited out of it, reduced the list of names to the far left side of my view, and asked Kim to put a call in to Harris.
“Use a screen, not my glasses,” I added. “And try to keep him from lifting any addresses during the call.”
“I can’t guarantee that,” replied the little tech. “There are other rooms in the castle that could do the trick, though.” I told him to go ahead and do the best he could.
Less than a minute later, we were both looking at a previously recorded message of a man shown from the waist up, dressed only in dozens of tattoos and a cybernetic eyepiece. As the image of Harris greeted us in his characteristic soundbytese and explained how he could not possibly answer all the calls that came his way, the environments behind him changed every few seconds from beachfront to nightclub to underwater to the Great Wall of China, and so forth. His tattoos also frequently stretched out to display themselves closer to the viewer, illustrating whatever point he was making at the moment and then receding to their home on his skin.
Kim was frantically resetting to retry when a live Harris suddenly appeared on the screen. He was wearing the same tattoos and eyepiece but was now situated only in a room crammed with arrays of equipment pressing in on all sides of him.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoooooa Nelly,” said the man, mashing some buttons in front of him and below the screen. “Is that really you? Sorry, it took me a New York Minute to recognize you. Is this really coming from the Black House, the Bates Mansion, the Tower of Babel? Don’t go, Mother Lode, whatever you do.…” I waved a finger at Kim, who disconnected in a rush and left the room.
“I’m here, Harris,” I said, and he froze, then smiled when he found my face on one of his screens. This was a big moment for him. He began talking like a news anchor.
“Sir Michael David Ares, born Manchester, England, knighted by His Majesty Noel I at the young age of twenty-six in honor of his exemplary service for the New British Empire in the Taiwan crisis. Retired from British military service to accept the position of executive agent with the Bay Area Security Service. Expected to replace the late Darien Anthony as senior executive agent, making him now one of the three most pow
erful men in the city-state of San Francisco.” The news about D had taken only a few hours to reach him, despite no public statements by BASS. Maybe he would have some information for me.
“So you can talk like a normal person,” I said.
“Normal person! Those Talking Heads on the news? I used to be one before my BadASS days, you know, and before my subsequent ascension to godhood. Believe Me Chelsea, they are not normal people! By now most of them are constructs, of course. Like I’m thinking you are, because Why Oh Why would Sir Michael Ares [in the news voice again] call moi?”
“Because I want some information, of course, and if you give it to me, I might consider letting your sorry arse stay in that hijacked asylum, rather than flushing you out like the sewage you are.”
“Oooooo,” rolling his head back and forth, “I’d like to see you try. It would be more like Vietnam or the Taurans than that staged cakewalk when you rescued that floating factory. Our West Coast offense is only words, pictures, sounds—but we can stop the run if we have to.” He paused to let that sink in. “Buh temee hall ah can hep ya, massa, an ah sees wuh ah cul do.”
“You obviously know about Darien Anthony—”
“Was much better on the field than on the front lines of our local media wars.”
“Do you know who killed him?”
“How in Sphincter City would I know that!”
“Then do you know if any of these former peacers were anywhere around here last night—Miguel Jimenez, Valeri Korcz, Therese Bester?” Those were the names from the list.
He stared at me for a moment, lost in his thoughts, then he seemed to be struck by one.
“I’ll tell you what, girlie-man,” he finally said, the last phrase in some sort of foreign accent. “I may be able to scratch your itch, at least un poco. But you have to give me a minute. How can I reach you?”
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” I said, then added “in one minute,” not wanting to spend more time than was absolutely necessary with this long shot.
“Right on,” he said, and was gone.
I called for Kim, asked him to forward a recording of the upcoming conversation to my glasses, and as we waited for the minute to pass, I asked, “Why do you suppose Harris makes those media references on a private call, when he’s not broadcasting and getting paid for them?”
“Maybe he is,” Kim said. “With his software skills, it wouldn’t be hard to cheat his customers. I hear there’s some pretty sophisticated cybercrime going on in the Red Tunnel. But then again, maybe it’s just second nature for him. You become what you say, right? The word is in your mouth and in your heart.”
I didn’t know about that, but a minute had passed, so I told him to put another call through and leave again.
Harris seemed genuinely glad that I had called back—perhaps too glad. He was smiling and shaking his head.
“And I thought I was good,” he said. “Our recording of that powwow we just had looks like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey and has no audio, period. I don’t suppose you could tell me how your people do that?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Do you have anything of use for me?”
“Believe it or not, Mulder and Scully, I do,” he answered, and my back stiffened suddenly. “The truth is out there. It just so happens that Mr. Korcz has been in town for three days, and when he stopped by the establishment of one of our subsidiary business partners, they say he checked some interesting hardware at the door.” He reached behind him to turn a dial, stopping some music that had begun to play during his explanation. Then he looked back at me.
“What specifically?” I asked.
“Guns the type that Working Men use, and a couple of hand-size disks that our amigos guessed were some kind of high-tech explosive. That’s all they said.”
I didn’t know if I was more excited to have a lead or shocked that I got it this way.
“You’re not asking me for anything,” I observed.
He smiled, winked, and said, “No charge,” then started singing. “I’m as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot chayeeyange…” I reached for the only button I knew in front of me and turned him off.
Eager to expend the angry energy simmering inside me, and not wanting to waste time wondering about the freak’s motives, I made a beeline to the Surveillance Center by way of one vertical and two horizontal elevators. I asked the nameless third-level on duty if she could insert an ex-agent’s DNA into the Eye’s database, and when I got a positive answer, I told her who and why. Then I took a seat and waited a few minutes for her to return, noticing that many of the other techs had slowed to half speed and were glancing at me inconspicuously. By the time the scan was under way, there was a crowd of them gathered behind me, all watching the ten-foot-wide holo projected from floor to ceiling in front of my seat.
We normally used the Eye to locate and track criminal suspects whose genetic ID had been recorded by us or some other law enforcement arm. But from time to time we needed it to find an agent, so I knew that as long as we still had Korcz’s print, and as long as he was still in the area, the Eye could find him. To locate him in another part of the country or world would have taken some finagling with other governments that maintained their own similar satellite systems, but it could be done.
That turned out to be unnecessary, however, because the projector soon displayed a map of the city, with our location highlighted toward the top and a similar blip flashing in the south. The map then began to enlarge, zooming in on the bottom half until a red circle representing Korcz was in the center of the holo. It then abruptly disappeared, replaced by a live aerial shot of Candlestick Park (affectionately known as the Stick), an old sports stadium south of the city that had been destroyed by the quake but then preserved in its ruined form as a popular tourist attraction. The view began to move closer to the wrecked arena, which looked like some massive monster had emerged out of the water next to it and taken a big bite out of its south side, taking some of the ground with it as well. It reminded me of the way the Colosseum in Rome had looked before Pal-Tel made their “statement to the world” with that tactical nuke.
When the Stick had grown to fill the screen, the projector superimposed a series of green dots, and one red one, which were moving around slowly at various locations throughout the large structure.
“We can’t get a visual, because he’s inside,” said the third-level. “But this is thermal.” She manipulated a remote, and the view encroached further on the red dot, until it turned into the red shape of a man, and I could see for the first time that he was accompanied by two green shapes, smaller and unremarkable, except that one appeared to be a man and the other a woman. I asked the tech where they were, but she wasn’t sure and looked around for some help. One of the onlookers spoke up.
“I think they’re just in the tunnels there, where they have those exhibits. You know, the videos and such from the quake. Looks to me like he’s just doing the tourist thing. There’s nothing else there, that I know of.” I looked back at the third-level, who shrugged, then touched her remote again.
“Whatever he’s doing, he’s armed,” she said, pointing to the holo. I looked that way and saw the red figure, now enlarged much further so that I could make out the two small blotches of black on his lower back, near the kidneys. The same place I wore my boas. “But his companions don’t seem to be,” she added, looking at me to indicate that her job was finished.
“We’ll have a little talk with him,” I said, and headed for the garage, barking orders into the glasses along the way to form an assault team of three aeros and a falconer.
5
Before noon, my aero, the three others, and a big flying van were approaching the old stadium over the hill just north of it. During the brief journey, I had wondered why Korcz would be hanging around a tourist spot if he had just committed a high-profile murder, and I had been introduced to Twitch, the new head puppeteer for this particular falconer. He told me his nickname had co
me from his mastery of holo games when he was “younger”—he wasn’t old enough yet to say “young.” Then he excitedly added, “But that was nothin’ like this, no sir.” His visual in the corner of my glasses revealed him to be a slight black man, his eyes and ears presently hidden by various contraptions as he and his team prepared to launch and guide the birds by remote control.
I also had taken a call from Paul, who looked like he was troubled and trying to hide it, but not quite succeeding. He asked what I was doing, I told him, and then he tried to talk me into letting someone else handle it. He wanted to talk with me at the Ranch, for some reason, and I guessed this was related to the distress behind his eyes. I told him that I would finish my business here, then call him, and he reluctantly agreed.
“The target is currently stationary,” said the third-level back in the Surveillance Center as the Stick came into full view in front of us. I heard her voice in the glasses, which were now open to several channels. “And his accomplices also.”
“Good timing,” I said, then told the aeros to land and the falconer to launch. Out of the rear of the skyvan sprang three small black shapes, like thick meter-long bullets, which then extended their wings and dived after the descending cars. Each one accompanied a different car to its landing spot, then they hovered behind the agents as they entered the building at three different places.
After directing my aero to hold its position, I turned the glasses to all-video and called up feeds from the Eye and the falconer. They filled my view, looking like a movie screen divided in half. On the left was the Eye’s thermal view of the stadium, with Korcz appearing as a red figure, his accomplices as green, and the approaching peacers as blue. The falcons were represented by smaller blue blips. The right half displayed an alternating view from the front cameras of each falcon, until I told Twitch’s editor to leave it on point for now.
I set the glasses so that one tap could bring the falcon view to full screen, and tried it. Immediately I was hit by the odd sensation of virtual motion, as I seemed to be floating about five feet behind the point man, following him through a big, curved tunnel inside the stadium where people used to walk to find their seats, buy food and drink from the concessions, and use the bathrooms. A few of the food stands were still food stands, but others had been converted to walk-in exhibits commemorating the various effects of the quake. There were tourists walking the hall and observing the displays—a thin crowd that parted easily when they caught sight of the goggled soldier and the sleek black metal bird moving through them.