The sprawl ganger shifted the bulk of his body and pulled a length of chain from inside his filthy denim jacket. “Yeah, Cleto. I asked you a question, shithead. Where is he?”
“There’s no one named Cleto here,”
The ganger glanced around the room. “Well, I can fucking see that, you little dickwad. You’re Cleto’s friend or something, right? Cleto leave my money? Little junkie owes me.” The big man stepped forward, closing in on the small clone. He didn’t move.
The heavy ganger growled and rolled his shoulders. “You’d better smarten up, paco. You have no fucking idea who you’re fucking with here.” He puffed out his chest and jabbed a fat, dirty finger in the clone’s face.
The shinigami looked up at him, his voice lowered to a whisper. “We’re new here. We don’t know this ‘Cleto’. You’ve made a mistake and come to the wrong apartment.”
“The fuck I did!” the big man roared. “I know that little shit’s artiste scribble.” He gestured with the chain at the drawings. “Fuck you! I didn’t come all the way over here to be jerked around by some pussy-assed little fucker!” He glared around the room again. “Someone’s paying me my money. If it ain’t Cleto, then it’s got to be you.” He smiled all teeth. “So lucky fucking you.” He reached behind him and slammed the door. “Now pay up!”
As the metal door screeched into place, the woman stepped away from the wall and waved her hand casually. The shaven head caught it out of the corner of his eye and jerked a step sideways against the possible threat. In that instant, the small man darted forward and slid up along his barrel chest. Reaching up, he grasped the ganger’s chin and the smooth curve of the back of his head. There was a loud snap.
A look of surprise suddenly flitted across the big man’s face. He realized, in the split second remaining, that he was looking at a woman directly behind him. She stared into his eyes as they went flat and the big ganger folded into himself onto the floor at her feet.
The door swung open again and Lieutenant Kaneda swept in, a two-fisted grip on a little Daewoo automatic pistol. “I heard a noise. What the—?” He froze, staring at the body. “Who’s he? What happened?”
The female agent spoke first. “He forced his way in. He said he was looking for a previous tenant who owed him money.”
“So you killed him?”
“He was a witness,” the small male spoke up. “His presence compromised operational security.”
“Operational secur—? Was there anybody else? Did anyone see him come in here?”
The big shinigami strode in behind him carrying two more of the military sacks slung over his shoulder. He took in the body with impassive eyes and set the packs down. “There weren’t any others.”
Lieutenant Kaneda turned on him. “What? How do you know?”
“We passed downstairs. I checked in the lobby, and in the street, while you were talking on your phone. He was alone.”
Lieutenant Kaneda ran his hands through his hair. “Not even six hours in country…” The three clones saw his hands tremble as he holstered the pistol under his arm. “All right,” he pointed to the smaller man. “You. You made this mess, so you’re going to clean it up. You need to get rid of the body somehow.”
“It is not necessary. The three of us are were ordered to focus on—”
“I’m the ranking officer!” Lieutenant Kaneda shouted. “And I say you can’t keep a body here.”
The three clones froze. “What about operational security?” the small man asked softly.
Lieutenant Kaneda stammered. “Exercise some, just get it done. I’ll be back at 2200 hours and I expect this body to be gone.”
As the young officer left the room, a silent understanding passed between the shinigami. Activated under Executive Hsiang’s direct authority, he’d made a point to tell them he considered all local, corporate personnel and materials secondary to their mission objective. They must obtain the nanotechnology, and they could use whatever lethal force they deemed necessary. Those were his explicit orders.
They would not fail.
----------
It was the end of another sweep and sniff operation in a filthy neighborhood south of the Barcelona UpCity. The sun was hot and high overhead, and Major Eames stood in the hatch of her command APC, the metal armor heating up like an oven plate. She pushed down her bone-deep weariness and swept the crowd with hard eyes.
This was the eleventh neighborhood her unit had searched in two days, and they were starting to blur together. All of it blurred together, in fact. God only knew how many times she’d driven down the similar trash-blown streets, past drab, decaying buildings splashed with the bright graffiti tags. Hell, she’d grown up outside the London Metro Zone, escaping a dead-end existence by enlisting in D-H Security Services on her seventeenth birthday. Except for a bit of local flavor, this place looked just like the old neighborhood. It was the same grimy, congealed mass, populated by sullen men smoldering in their impotence, snot-faced, scrawny children, and pinched, pleading mothers clutching their paltry belongings. Suffering Christ, it was Hell on the dole.
Bangladesh, Budapest, Brixton or Barcelona… it didn’t matter; the sprawls were spreading, swallowing each other. Soon, there’d be nothing but one continuous slum covering the planet, punctuated only by an occasional walled corporate oasis. Everywhere a vast accretion of people, concrete, steel, and garbage, bordered by cold, empty oceans stirred by sluggish tides.
God damn it, she hated this place. She hawked, trying to spit the stench of rotting fruit, piss, and exhaust from the back of her throat. It didn’t help.
She glared over the crowd again, saw it flex and ripple. Even not understanding the language, she recognized the running mutter of resentment. News was spreading and things were definitely getting worse. She’d deployed four platoons this time, and they’d cordoned the whole neighborhood into the parking decks near some central square so the search and sniff teams could sweep their buildings unmolested.
But nothing worked right. Even with all the credits they were floating around, the sprawlers grew more restless, less cooperative in each neighborhood. They’d grown defiant. Fights had broken out in the last three neighborhoods, and the Spanish troops were chafing under the contempt. Perhaps starting in the southern sprawl hadn’t been the best idea. Those Basques had a long memory.
She rubbed her eyes to clear them. Someone—it sounded like a man—started shouting, and immediately a chant surged up. She scanned him, but all she caught was the tidal sway of grubby faces burbling on the riot edge of panic. A line of G.C. police moved forward, while troopers on top of armored vehicles pointed “Screamers”, focused acoustic amplifiers, toward the crowd.
Major Eames gripped the lip of the hatch opening. Christ on a crutch, not again, she thought, and braced herself. But the tension deflated at the sight of the police and the threat of noise suppression. The Spanish colonel, Estevana, came up to the side of the vehicle.
“Report, Colonel?”
“Si, Major. Nothing unusual. Again. The typical assortment of drugs: some crank, about five hundred hits of slipstream, and three kilos of rage. Four handguns, two old military assault rifles, several boxes of anarchist propaganda. That’s all, Major.”
“And no hit with the sniffers, right?” Dawson-Hull allocated two full search teams with DNA samplers to lock onto trace genetic material, either from the asset or the unidentified blood found inside the lab.
“No, Major. Nothing.”
“Any word from Interpol?”
“No ma’am. Not a thing.”
She slammed her hand on the steel ring. “Someone has that blood on file. The infiltrators didn’t get that good without a background. Somebody trained them, ran them, then cut them loose, so there has to be a trace out there. We need a break here. What about the Cross-Corporate Data Share?
“With all due respect, Major, most of the profiles there are bottom feeders: thieves, fanatics, anarchists. All loose cannons, dangerous to any concer
n. No multinational is going to profile a first-rate operative. Especially one they might contract.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Very well then.” She waved wearily. “We have to keep moving. No arrests, seize all the contraband. Distribute the food and med packets along with the reward bulletins. Make sure they understand informants remain anonymous. Then tell the troops they can stand down for one hour before the next sweep.”
“Yes, ma’am. At once.” He saluted and started chattering into his radio. Diesel engines roared to life and black smoke swirled in the air. A line of army supply trucks inched forward into the central square.
She spit again and looked over the crowd one last time. The perimeter troops were shouting now, herding the crowds into rough lines in front of each supply truck. The mob shifted under orders, collecting around the tall drab vehicles. She watched them take their bribe bundles and trudge back to their ransacked homes. At the head of one line, a little blonde girl in a flower-print dress was staring directly at her armored personnel carrier. Small fires of contempt, unclouded by self-pity, burned in her eyes. Major Eames stopped and remembered being the same age, watching police patrols cruise past her building in South London, and she wondered if she ever looked like that.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: CONTINUITY OF SIGN
Barcelona Metro Zone. Western Sprawl District. 2:10 p.m. Day Two.
Hester stared at the map in front of him. Barcelona Metro’s four districts were highlighted in blue, the massive Port Complex in gray. Where, o where had the little lamb gone?
He eliminated Old Barcelona first. Whoever stole the boy was good, but wouldn’t have the time or money to go to ground in UpCity. So scratch one. The Port was busy round-the-clock, so no sense hiding there. Scratch two. That left the sprawls. Three major districts, eighteen sub-districts, twenty million plus people crammed into twenty-four thousand square kilometers. That’s where he’d go, and if these contractors were half as good as they seemed, that’s where they’d be.
Hester rotated the map to another angle. At least there wasn’t a civil war going on, he thought. That would make this downright impossible. But where to start? That was the question. He needed continuity of sign, some evidence of the team’s passage or intentions, to narrow down the search. Hester wondered for the fifth time why the boy wasn’t chipped. But then, that would make this easy. At least the dark room lads had given him a tracker. The nanite-rich hemoglobin in the boy’s blood would register, but only when he was within ten kilometers. I suppose I should be glad they have such confidence in my abilities… Hester sighed and rotated the map again.
The sat-link chimed in his ear. “Hester?”
“Yes, Mr. MacKinnon?”
“What’s the situation?”
“On site, getting my bearings, sir. Any word on who rousted the Toulouse labs yet?”
“Still waiting on the report on the blood found in the lab, but there’s a very short list of teams that capable,” MacKinnon’s voice answered. “Cross-reference those few with probable connections to Asian Pacific... and an Eshu International out of Belfast is on top. Not confirmed, mind you, but they’re the most likely suspects.”
“Understood, sir. Profiles available on Eshu International crew? I’m monitoring both Eames’ task force and the Spanish Security Grid, and I’ll integrate their chatter into the search parameters, but it’d be helpful to know who I’m up against. Maybe narrow the search down a bit.”
“I’m forwarding their files now. Let me know if you need anything else. That clone must be picked up, alive, and healthy. Our property is the priority, and Brenton tells me there’s very little time.”
“All I need is to get close, sir. Once I’m in the neighborhood, the tracker will pick him up. I’ll verify the boy’s presence and take it from there. I won’t let you down, Mr. MacKinnon.”
“You never have, Hester. That’s why I brought you in on this.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something definite.”
“Right, MacKinnon out.”
Hester opened the personnel files for Eshu International and started scanning. “All right lads, if you’re the toshers in question, there must be a reason you picked Barcelona. So what is it?”
--------------------------------
That afternoon, Barcelona Metro authorities slammed a lockdown on the sprawls. Constant policía patrols, transport hubs under heavy restriction, checkpoints on all major roads, and a curfew at 23:30 until further notice made a sticky situation worse. Word through Alejo’s contacts said a large contingent of Dawson-Hull troops were acting as “security advisors” to local law enforcement, and that they’d run dozens of no knock, sweep and clear operations in the south district. D-H was searching hard for Gibson.
It looked like they were gearing up to do the same here because I spotted the black bellies of surveillance drones circling in the sky like vultures, and I noticed heavy police concentrations at the local precincts. To top it off, the newsnets had begun streaming terrorist alerts every fifteen minutes, and Tam and I guessed those had at least ten million impoverished citizens peering out their windows eyeing every stranger for a shot at the government reward money.
Paranoia Lotto. Free this week! Play early. Play often.
Just when I couldn’t think of another thing to make my time in Barcelona more difficult, Tam tapped me to make the run on a UpCity hospital to steal the cyber-equipment for Poet9. I love it when I volunteer.
I’d gone to check on Poet9, and found Tam and Doc K. in mid-conversation. Standing over him, they both looked pretty grim.
“How is he, Ibram?” I asked. “Is he… fused?”
Ibram Kalahani had been our resident sawbones for over ten years, ever since the last Middle East war. His tall, almost gaunt, frame housed one of the most brilliant minds in advanced medical technology, but the elderly Israeli doctor shook his head at my question. “I was telling Tam, I don’t have the right equipment, but as far as I can determine, the breakers in the interface module tripped in time. His central nervous system was shocked from the blast, there doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage.”
“So he’ll pull through. How long until he comes around?” I said. “It’s getting hairier every hour, and I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”
“Devante is in a light coma. His body is protecting itself and trying to heal.”
“That’s good. For how long?”
“That’s where it gets knotty. Cyber gear, especially that sophisticated, connects directly with his cerebral cortex. It’s wired into the nerve bundles. That machine is part of him, so to bring him out of the coma, it needs to be reset. He’s not going anywhere until that happens.”
“So hit the button and reset it,” Tam said.
“If it were that easy, you think we’d be having this conversation? That’s an advanced Chiba-Essen series, a state-of-the-art military and corporate security interface module. I can’t just run into CompWorld and pick up the softs over the counter. The unit needs specialized equipment. Equipment I told you I don’t have here.” Ibram answered.
“Where do we get it?” Tam asked.
I could tell by the look on Doc’s face we weren’t going to like the answer.
“Only two places I know of: locked up in a top-level prosthetics and microsurgery department in a corporate city hospital, or secured at an advanced cybernetic spec-ops trauma unit on a military base. Take your pick.”
I was right. We didn’t like the answer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: BACK TO YOMI
Research Facility Five, Asian Pacific Consortium Black Lab. Chishima Islands. 5:23 p.m. Day Two.
The wind was a moaning constant out of the Pacific, an icy wall of sound and force off the churning water that drove painfully into his body and stung uncovered skin numb. Completely alone on the surface of the island, Dr. Shoei leaned forward ever so slightly, relaxing in slow degrees, and allowed the force of the gale to keep him upright. Below, blue steel waves smashed onto
black crags, turning to mist and hissing as they withdrew. The sound of their assault poured up and over the cliff edge, roaring in the air around him and joining the relentless howl.
He found it perfect.
None of his coworkers joined him in his weekly trips to the top. “Expeditions” he jokingly called them. After their first time, usually in the first month of their assignments at the facility, they never came with him again. Ever. They complained it was desolate and stayed below after that initial exposure. They choose to recreate in the gym, library, or V.R. Not even security accompanied him anymore. After all, where could he go?
But Dr. Shoei returned to the black rock surface of the island every week. This was his pilgrimage, and he, like a faithful junreisha, trod the same path, along the same promontory, to the same high cliff every time. There on the sharp overhang, the ocean and sky stretched away vast and empty beneath his feet, and the far horizon vanished in alloyed gray. There he was surrounded, subsumed by it all.
He had decided his fellow scientists were frightened. They were too conditioned to the frenetic hives of Tokyo or Osaka, Kobe or Nagasaki, to the endless rivers of people, vehicles, light, and noise. The harsh expanse unnerved them. To be honest, Dr. Shoei had felt far more alone in those warrens of steel, glass and concrete, the labs, universities, mega-cities, than he ever felt here. The others needed the comfort of commotion, but after his first time up top, he’d found himself craving the emptiness.
This was a primal solitude, a severity of penance, as if the wind were scouring out the static and chaff, blowing away the incessant demand and petty pressures, leaving behind a wilderness, stark and terrible, beautiful in its clarity. This was his chiseled shuin for another week below. The wind paused, and the doctor caught himself, straightened up and opened his eyes.
He looked down at his watch: ten minutes before he had to get back to the elevator.
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