by Eric Brown
He almost took it then, but stopped himself.
If a card was reported missing today, then the chances were that the security-com in the foyer would be reprogrammed to alert staff in the event of its being used. He would have to take the card on the day he planned to escape, and use it before the tech noticed its absence.
The following morning he made his way down to the lab, wearing a jacket which he took off and hung on one of the pegs in the entrance. To his relief, he found that the same two techs who had deposited their coats yesterday had done so again today. Creatures of habit.
In a day or two, it would be a simple matter of taking his time with his jacket while he snapped the ID card from the lab coat...
That afternoon, Lew Kramer came up with the goods, as promised.
Barney had just emerged from an abortive session in VR - Hal wasn’t mentioned in the conference: the management team had discussed sales - and was drinking orange juice in the window seat when the doorbell chimed.
Lew pushed in, his broad-shouldered bulk filling the doorway. He held up a shrink-wrapped package.
‘I had this cooked up by the tech team,’ he said. ‘Take a look.’
Barney took the wrapping from the chu and held it up, a lightweight balaclava of fine capillaries connected to a mall control handset.
‘That’s great, Lew. I should have fun with this ...’
‘Here, there’s something I want to show you.’
He activated the handset and adjusted the slide. The chu, lying collapsed on the coffee table between them, displayed a ghastly series of shrunken faces.
‘Here we go,’ Lew said, and picked up the chu. He arranged it over his hand like a glove-puppet and said, ‘Recognise?’
Barney looked into his old face. ‘Never realised I was so handsome.’
‘We downloaded it from images of your original we had in stock. It’s enhanced, made to look around ten years younger than his true age. Suit you?’
‘Great. It’ll make looking in the mirror bearable again.’
‘There are about a dozen other faces on the chu as well, in case you get tired of your old mug.’
Lew made to go. ‘Oh, and before I forget.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bag. He dropped it on the table beside the chu. ‘Five-dollar coins. About a hundred dollars’ worth. Should keep you in candy for a while. Tell me when you run out, okay?’
When Lew departed, Barney sat in his chair by the window and stared at the chu and the coins. When he managed to take the ID card, he’d be away. In the morning, he decided, he’d go for it...
Of course, the problem of the tracer implanted in his NCI remained, but Barney had a couple of contacts who might know how to fix the tracer. As soon as he left the building after the morning lab session, he’d head uptown and call on these guys. With luck, his absence would not be immediately noticed.
And if they couldn’t fix the tracer? Christ, he’d worry about that later. The main thing was to get away, find Hal and warn him that the Mantoni security team was onto him, tell him to take extra care with who he talked to about the Charlesworth case.
Just before nine the following morning, Barney left his suite and took the elevator down to the 90th floor. If the techs had hung their lab coats, then at one o’clock he’d be on his way. As he pushed through the swing door to the labs, he felt a tight knot of expectation in his gut. Christ, he thought, am I actually feeling - or was it merely a psychosomatic reaction to the intellectual game he was playing?
He shrugged off his coat, turned the corner and approached the row of pegs. There were no lab coats in sight. He left his jacket and told himself that there would be other opportunities in future.
The lab session passed without incident - the techs who usually ditched their coats were obviously feeling the chill of the air-conditioning this morning. At one he returned to his suite, disappointed. He ate a light lunch, then decided to check on what the Mantoni management team was up to.
He entered the cyberverse via the basal rent in the California site, and made his way to the glowing Mantoni core.
One hour later he hit the jackpot, and what he heard made him grateful that his planned departure had been delayed.
Halfway through the meeting, Sellings said, ‘I hear there’s been progress on the Halliday front?’
‘We’ve devised a means of finding out what we need to know, sir,’ the head of security said.
He outlined the scheme. Barney listened, knowing that he was unable to stop them implementing the plan. His only hope lay in getting to Hal in time - and his only hope of being able to do that lay in escaping from the building.
‘Ingenious,’ Sellings said. ‘When do you start?’
‘We’ll send a team around to his office tomorrow afternoon at one, sir. There’s just one thing...’
‘And that is?’
‘The status of the subject, Halliday. Is he expendable?’
Sellings nodded. ‘We don’t want him finding out that we had any involvement in the affair,’ he said. ‘He’s expendable.’
When the meeting finished, Barney returned to his suite in the real world and thought through what he should do.
That evening, as he sat in his recliner and stared out at the light-show that was night-time Manhattan, he wondered why he was planning to help Hal like this. It had nothing to do with emotion, he thought. Nothing to do with old friendship, loyalty, duty ... Then what, he asked himself? Could it simply be that he had weighed the morality of both sets of opponents, Halliday and the Mantoni organisation, and found one to be wanting? The organisation was corrupt and, like every grouping of human beings gathered to ensure the perpetuation of vested interest, evil and capable of any deed to get what it desired.
Halliday was a lone figure, pitched against a corrupt enemy, and he needed all the help he could get.
Or perhaps, Barney conceded late into the night, perhaps the NCI containing the copy of Barney Kluger did still possess, hidden deep somewhere in its convoluted subroutines and programming, some vestige of loyalty towards his old partner?
The following morning he woke early and, as he showered and dressed preparatory to making his way down to the labs, it came to him that Hal’s life depended on the success of his actions over the next few hours.
* * * *
Twenty-One
When Halliday awoke he was no longer in the dome.
He lay in bed in a small room, its stark minimalism suggesting a hospital, though there was no evidence of surgical apparatus in sight, no monitors or diagnostic coms.
He sat up and swung his legs from the bed, and his head swam with the sudden movement. He ached in every bone of his body, and he experienced a familiar nausea that resulted from an extended period in VR.
He was bare-chested. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at his body, touching the neat line that vertically bisected his chest - the only evidence that remained of the shooting. He took a series of deep breaths, filling his lungs; he felt weak, and when he held his right arm out before him he saw that his hand was trembling uncontrollably.
A digital calendar on the wall told him that it was the twelfth of July, a week to the day since Tallak had shot him. Weak sunlight filled the room. A window looked out across a street to a row of town houses, and he heard the occasional engine of a passing automobile. So he was in the city, somewhere.
He felt suddenly tired and lay down. A nurse entered the room, smiled at him and applied something cold to the skin of his forearm. He wanted to protest that he was feeling fine, and didn’t want to sleep, but seconds later he felt himself slipping ...
Later he was aware of a doctor standing over him, examining him with devices that glinted silver in the overhead fluorescents. He drifted, heard the medic talking to him. He even replied, but recalled nothing of the conversation, other than the doctor’s parting words, ‘I see no reason why you can’t leave tomorrow, Mr Halliday.’
When he came awake again, the cale
ndar read the fourteenth of July. He felt better; the nausea was gone, and his body no longer ached quite so badly. A clock on the cabinet beside the bed read 10.45.
He sat up and swung his legs out of bed, and only then saw that he had company.
Casey sat on a chair by the window, her sneakered feet hanging centimetres above the floor.
‘Hi, Hal. How you feeling?’
He smiled, shook his head. ‘Better than I thought I would, considering.’
‘They called me last night, said you could go home today. I’ve brought some things.’ She indicated a neatly folded pile of clothes on top of the bedside cabinet.
‘Great.’ He looked across at her. She was swinging her legs, smiling at him.
If she harboured any resentment after their conversation in the Serengeti site, she gave no sign. It was so fresh in his memory that he could hardly bring himself to look her in the eye - but for her, he reminded himself, their meeting in VR had occurred five days ago.
He dressed slowly, the simple act of pulling on his jeans requiring an effort and degree of concentration that surprised him. When it came to buttoning his shirt, he found that his fingers had lost dexterity and coordination.
Casey sighed. ‘Here, let me do that, okay?’
He didn’t protest. She stood before him, lips compressed as she quickly fastened the buttons from the bottom up. He wondered whether he should hug her, tell her how good it was to see her again.
‘There. You ready? Let’s go, okay? I’ll give you a guided tour of your new office. Just wait till you see it, talk about swish! Makes your old place look kinda cheap.’
He had to think about walking, concentrate on keeping his balance as he stepped from the room and down a carpeted corridor. Uniformed nurses moved back and forth with a quick efficiency that left him vicariously exhausted. Casey slowed her pace to match his, taking his arm and glancing at him with concern.
When they emerged into the daylight, he saw a low morning sun emerging from behind a skyline of mansions to the east. He guessed they were on the Upper West Side somewhere. The sidewalk was quiet, with only the occasional pedestrian walking a dog or taking a leisurely stroll.
‘What day is it, Casey?’
‘Sunday,’ she said, ‘all day.’
He laughed. Now that he knew, the day did have that strange, indefinable atmosphere of lassitude possessed only by the traditional day of rest.
Casey had a cab waiting. As they motored east through quiet streets, she took his arm and squeezed. ‘Hey, guess what?’
He looked at her. She seemed so young, so enthusiastic and full of life. ‘Go on.’
‘That interview I had, the last time I saw you in the real world—’
‘Don’t tell me, Casey. You got the job, right?’
‘Right on. It’s only waitressing, but it’s in a big diner on Fifth and there’s a chance of promotion. I work part-time, five afternoons a week. So I’ll have my mornings free to come round and bug you, okay?’
He smiled. ‘I couldn’t stop you if I wanted to, could I?’
She punched him. ‘I start today at two. I’ll have time to get you settled in your new place, then I’m off.’
His office was in a plush three-storey walk-up off Lexington Avenue where El Barrio phased into Carnegie Hill, about ten blocks south of his old office. Ten blocks, but it might have been a world away from the poverty of his old haunt. There were no beggars or refugees in sight, no food stalls in the street; the buildings had the appearance of having been maintained over the years, and not allowed to fall into the decrepitude that had overtaken so much of the city north of 96th Street.
Casey paid off the taxi and led him across the sidewalk.
‘Hey, he said, stopping. ‘How’d that get here?’ He indicated his battered Ford slumped in the gutter.
Casey smiled at him, unable to conceal an expression of pleasure. ‘I had it brought back from Chinatown, Hal. Couldn’t leave Barney’s old banger down there to get broken into, could I? C’mon.’
They passed through a swing door into a spacious, mock-marble tiled corridor. They took an elevator to the third floor and he followed Casey down a short corridor to a door at the far end.
‘Okay, Hal. Close your eyes.’
He did as she ordered. He heard her swipe a key-card through the lock and the door click open. She took his hand and pulled him inside.
‘You can open them now. What do you think?’
He peered around a large, red-carpeted room that looked more like a doctor’s surgery than the office of a one-man detective agency.
Potted plants, a landscape painting on the wall, a silver kidney-shaped desk ... Barney would have died laughing.
‘Well?’
‘I’m impressed. Some place. I dunno, though ... I feel like I don’t belong here.’
‘You’ll fit in, Hal, given time. You feed yourself up, get fit again. Buy yourself some new clothes.’
She danced around the desk, fell into a big swivel recliner chair and lodged her feet beside the desk-com - his system from the old place, he was pleased to see.
She rocked back and forth. ‘You’ll attract a different kind of customer, Hal. Rich folk with dollars to burn.’
‘Yeah, and commissions to find their missing poodles.’
Casey shrugged. ‘It’d be safer than missing persons,’ she said.
He ignored her, and sensed that Casey immediately regretted digging up that old bone of contention.
‘I’ll show you the apartment. Follow me.’
A connecting door gave onto a lounge furnished with what looked like a genuine black leather three-piece suite. A sound system was stacked in one corner, and a big screen covered the whole of the wall opposite the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the quiet street.
Halliday whistled. ‘Impressive.’
‘It’s leased for a year, with an option to renew next July.’ She saw his look and explained, ‘I talked to the realtor when I moved some of your clothes and stuff from the old place.’
She opened another door. ‘And this is the bedroom, Hal. Bit more comfy than the old dump.’
Polished imitation timber floorboards, white walls, a bed the size of a tennis court. ‘I don’t think I can take so much luxury, Casey.’
‘There’s a bathroom through there,’ she said, pointing to a door, ‘and a kitchen off the lounge. You can give dinner parties that’ll be the talk of the town.’
‘You haven’t tasted my cooking.’
He moved back into the lounge and stared around him. He felt a vague sense of discomfort at being the recipient of such largesse, when Casey was holed up in a one-room dive back in El Barrio.
He wondered if she had manufactured this guided tour in a bid to elicit the comparison and make him feel guilty. Then he told himself that it wouldn’t have crossed her mind to set him up like that. She was merely delighted to be showing him around his windfall.
Hey, where’s the jellytank, Casey?’
She shrugged, affecting a sudden interest in the sound system.
‘They didn’t bring it along with the desk-com?’ he asked.
‘Dunno. If it isn’t here ...’
He wouldn’t have put it past her, he thought, to have told the hauliers that the jellytank was staying behind.
He stepped through to the office and checked the desk. ‘The oak,’ he called back. ‘Casey, did you bring the bonsai tree?’
She appeared in the doorway, a guilty grimace on her face. ‘The movers must’ve shifted it from the desk when they took the com, Hal. I never saw it when I packed your clothes. I didn’t think...’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll pick it up later.’ He felt a sudden and irrational fear that some harm had come to the tree, that the hauliers had decided to help themselves to it, or the office had been broken into in his absence, the tree stolen or vandalised.
Casey looked at the watch on her thin wrist. ‘It’s time I wasn’t here, Hal. You okay? Don’t need anything?’
<
br /> ‘I’m fine. I’ll just stick around and get used to the place.’
She moved to the door and stopped. ‘Hey, you know the other day? The date we made, and then you went and got yourself shot?’
‘Yeah, the things I do to get out of seeing you.’
‘How about we take in a holo-drama tonight, Hal, then go dine some place?’
He felt a subtle weight of commitment settle upon his shoulders. I can’t give you what you want, Casey, he almost said. Instead he just smiled and said, ‘Sure, why not? Around seven?’