by Gregg Taylor
“Sure,” I said. “They call them Shades. It’s a pretty desperate sort of life from what I hear.”
She nodded. “It is. No profile, no interface. No interface, no existence. A living death, denied the most basic of services. Many people would prefer prison, or the grave.”
I shrugged. “Sure,” was all I said.
“Do you know how many people there are out there living that kind of life?”
“I guess I don’t.”
“No one does.” Her eyes were moist with what seemed like genuine empathy. “Because Omniframe says that they don’t exist. The erasure is achieved by means of a fairly unsophisticated worm. Difficult to protect against because it is so small. All it can do is destroy. Imagine if instead of taking your identity away, it could make you a new one. A clean slate, if you will. The opportunity to create a whole new profile, a whole new identity, as real as any other in Omniframe. Become a new person, or just one with better education or qualifications, more money...”
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound half bad.”
She nodded. “I can’t imagine too many would disagree with you. But if it became common enough, it would tear the very fabric of our world apart. I can’t let that become my father’s legacy. And you won’t let that happen, will you, Mister Finn? You’ll help me, won’t you?”
The question was hushed and breathless. It fell from perfect lips like rose petals on the wind. I figured any side deals had gone out the window with my memory. Time to pick a team.
“Sure I will, kid,” I said. “Sure I will.”
We sat in silence for a moment as a busboy came to take our bowls away.
“So tell me,” I asked, “why would your father create this code if he worked for internal security?”
“Men like my father have protected the Omniframe for a generation.” She led ever so slightly with her chin as she spoke, real pride in her voice. I tried to forget that the father she loved was a ’Frame spook. “They devote their lives to defeating interface security in order to improve it. He was thrilled when he was put on the M.I.R. Project. It was his dream. Until Carter got wind of it.”
“Carter?”
“A big man. Very slick. I only saw him once, but he struck me as a dangerous sort. Looked like a businessman I suppose, but there were too many bodyguards.”
“Carter the first or the last name?”
“The last name. As I say, I only met him once, at my father’s house. It was obvious that something was hanging in the air, but he was very polite to me. Insisted that I call him Cyrus.” She shivered. “But there was something in his eyes even then. I knew something was wrong.”
“Back up a tick, angel,” I said, my heart floating in the small, warm sea of Pho in the pit of my stomach. “Cyrus Carter?”
“You know him?” She seemed surprised.
“Not personally.”
Cyrus Carter. Cyrus the Locust. Even my Swiss-cheese head remembered who that was. The biggest and the deadliest underworld kingpin in... well, in wherever he happened to be at any given moment, and two continents on either side. And he’d done it all without getting his hands dirty. I checked to see if I was still breathing and made a note of what it felt like for later.
“At first my father wouldn’t tell me anything, but I insisted. Somehow Carter had learned of my father’s discovery. He hounded him day and night. He bribed him, threatened him, and I’m convinced he killed him. Or had him killed.”
I stood. “We should get you to your hotel.”
I looked up at the video screen above the counter as she gathered her things. The info scroll at the bottom of the display promised new revelations in the gruesome homicide in Section 23 in the NewsNet at the top of the hour.
Ah yes, the body. Which meant that if the bad guys didn’t kill me, the good guys probably would. And I still didn’t know why. There’s a strange feeling of invulnerability when you’ve got nowhere left to run.
It couldn’t possibly last.
EIGHT
The door to Claire Marsland’s hotel room stuck a little, as if the frame was slightly warped. The carpet wasn’t new, but it was clean in a hotel-room kind of way. There was a wardrobe rack near the door, across from another door that led into the bathroom. Small shower stall, nice and clean, extra towels, no gangsters lurking behind the toilet tank and yes, I checked.
We had gone to the hotel that she’d made a reservation at, which might have been careless, but there was no room in Bountiful above the level of dumpster or tar-paper shack that would have checked her in without scanning her Exchange Stick anyway. So if someone was looking, they’d have found her right enough, and there didn’t seem to be any way around it.
The place couldn’t possibly have been anything but a hotel room. There was a dark wood table that was meant to serve as a desk, and a hard wooden chair with thin padding on the seat that roughly matched the carpet. There was an end table with a lamp that didn’t work and a bed that dominated the centre of the room to which I tried to pay very little attention, as it led to a series of entirely unprofessional thoughts about my client. I pulled the curtains back to reveal a reasonably decent view of the downtown lights, made into a showy display by the driving rain against the window.
“Nice,” I said quietly.
“It’s the best hotel I could afford, I’m afraid.” She seemed embarrassed.
“You’re not in New Coast anymore, angel,” I said, considering the view another moment before drawing the curtains tight. “I wasn’t being sarcastic.”
I looked back at her on the other side of the room. She was smiling in a way I was completely unprepared for. Amused, I guess, but something more played about her eyes.
“What are you smiling at?”
She leaned back against the wall and seemed to press her shoulders into it, just a little. “You talk like a character in a gaudy novel,” she said.
I nodded. “Does it annoy you?”
She shook her head. “No. It inspires confidence.”
“Well, that’s something anyway.”
She smiled. “What now?” she asked. I didn’t get the feeling that she meant to imply anything untoward, which was a damned shame. It was my general impression that she didn’t entertain strange thugs in her hotel room often and it made me feel awkward in spite of myself. I wasn’t thinking anything that every man that looked at her didn’t think, I knew that much. But I was the one alone with her in her room, in a city in which she knew no one, in the middle of a situation that was more dangerous than she knew, and all of that made me feel a hot pang of guilt for considering what I couldn’t help but consider.
I pulled the hard wooden chair away from the desk and sat down. It felt more casual, or maybe just slightly less predatory.
“You tell me, kid. When you were rehearsing this speech on the shuttle, before you met me. What did you plan on saying to me right now?”
She shrugged and said, “Good night?”
“You want me to go?” I offered.
“No.” She didn’t quite say it, but her lips moved, and there was a little whisper that couldn’t have been any other word. We were on opposite sides of the room. But the air was suddenly thick with tension. Those eyes were locked on me and I realized with a strange dread that she wanted me to kiss her. Maybe almost as much as I wanted to.
The trouble with trying to be a decent guy was that it was profoundly not in my nature and I knew it. It is possible that I just did not like nice girls. If she were dirty, if she were a hellcat, a killer, a double-dealer or if I just had the impression that she’d been round the block a few times and wouldn’t remember me longer than it would take for my aftershave to fade, I’d have had her on the bed in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t have even stopped to wonder if maybe it wasn’t a great idea to get involved with a client, or let my guard down during a nasty piece of business like this, when I couldn’t produce a piece of ID, have told you where my apartment was or if I had a middle name.
&nbs
p; But then I suppose it wouldn’t have been nearly as exciting.
She blushed and laughed and the moment was broken.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I think I’m feeling a little over-dramatic.”
I shook my head. “My fault,” I said. “I let you knock back all that Pho back at the bar.”
She laughed and played with the necklace again. “Well, I appreciate your not wanting to take advantage of me in that condition.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to,” I said seriously. “Let’s be very clear, that’s not the case at all. But there are probably things to be considered first.”
“You’re a very blunt man, aren’t you?”
“I promise you, Miss Marsland, this is me at my most subtle.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded good, and I could tell that she thought so too.
“So there are things to be considered first, are there?” she asked, tucking her hair behind her left ear. “Would you enumerate them please?”
“I couldn’t produce anything like a comprehensive list off the top of my head, beyond asking what you need me for.” I caught myself just before she laughed and blushed again. “Let me try that again. Why did you hire a detective, Miss Marsland?”
“Won’t you call me Claire?”
“I will if you answer my question.”
“It occurred to me that I couldn’t do this alone,” she said seriously. “Bountiful City has a reputation, and at any rate, I’ve never been here before. If I was right about my father’s death... it struck me that I could use someone in my corner.”
I nodded. “That could be just about right. How long did you plan to string me along with the story about the little lost sister?”
She shrugged. “As long as I needed to.” She looked down at her shoes.
“You think you’re admitting something awful, angel, but you’re not. Everybody lies to their detective. If you’d given me any other answer I’d have known I couldn’t trust you any more than you were ready to trust me.”
A cloud passed over her eyes. “I can trust you, can’t I, Mister Finn?”
I nodded. “You can, but you shouldn’t. Just on general principles.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Suit yourself. What’s our next step?”
She sighed and pulled a portable Omnilink terminal out of her bag. “My father left me a message before he died. He’d destroyed every copy of E2-476 to keep it from falling into this man Carter’s hands. But there was a backup. He always had a backup, hidden somewhere, far from the prying eyes of his superiors. As a safety precaution, in case they came after him.”
“In case who came after him?”
“Omniframe Internal Security.”
I snorted in spite of myself. “Nice sort of playmates. So having created the ultimate weapon against what passes for reality these days, he put a copy in his pocket, just in case.”
She nodded. “Just in case. He never intended to use it. But he couldn’t lay hands on it to destroy it, and he couldn’t be certain that he wouldn’t...” She trailed off and turned away.
“He couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t spill if the question were put a little rough.”
She nodded. “The letter was written the day before he died. I didn’t find it until two days later. Since then I’ve been struggling with what to do.”
“Why didn’t you go to ’Frame Internal?”
“I didn’t trust them. Once my father died, his projects were canceled. Which means they didn’t exist and they never had.”
“So if a girl showed up at their door with news of a threat that Omniframe says doesn’t exist-”
“There’s really no telling what might have happened.”
We let that hang in the air for a moment, but we both had a general idea of what probably would have happened. Claire Marsland would suddenly be found to have never existed, and the girl who was once her would disappear into a very dark hole.
“So you hired yourself a gumshoe long-distance, bought a shuttle ticket and came to save Daddy’s legacy?”
“Something like that.”
“Something like that. So what happens now? What did his message say?”
She set the Interlink terminal on the table beside me. Her arm brushed up against mine and I could feel her jump a little at the contact.
“When I arrived in Bountiful, I was to transmit a code to a blind interlink address,” she said, looking for the plug in the wall.
“Then what?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No idea,” she said. “Perhaps it is delivered, perhaps I receive instructions-”
“Perhaps you should wait until morning,” I interrupted.
“Do you think so?” she asked. “Why?”
“There may be a human element on the other end of that address. And they may or may not be someone we can trust. Or they may or may not have already been compromised. If Cyrus the Locust is involved in this, the reception committee at the shuttle pad was almost certainly working for him. If it’s another player, we need to know that too.” I moved for the door.
“Where are you going?” she asked with a tremor in her voice.
“We need some answers,” I said, “and we won’t find them sitting around here. If someone’s looking for you, they won’t have much trouble finding you. But as long as you’re in the hotel, there’s security everywhere. And cameras. Locust wouldn’t move on you here.”
“How can you be sure?” she said, a little desperate.
“I can’t. Put the chair under the doorknob. And take this.” I handed her the second key the clerk had given us when she checked in.
“Why don’t you keep this?”
“So there’s no chance I could give it up,” I said, “if the question were put a little rough.”
She turned pale. “Don’t leave me,” she said quietly.
“Don’t worry, angel. You’re never really alone if you’ve got a Monitor-29.” And with that I produced Felco’s little gun from my pocket and pressed it into her hand. “You know how to use one of these?” She nodded. I made her look at me. “Fire center mass, you hear me? Don’t get fancy. Center mass. And then call the law, not the house dick. If someone got this far they either paid security off or put them out of the picture.”
She looked like she might fall down.
“If I thought it was likely to happen, I wouldn’t go anywhere,” I said seriously. “The smart play is to wait it out. Follow you. See what develops.”
“That’s the smart play?”
“It is.”
“So what are you going to do?”
I thought about this for a moment. “Something stupid,” I replied.
NINE
It wasn’t really all that bad an idea. I was almost sure of this.
Bountiful was a hard place but it needed tourists, just like anywhere else. So the hotels were prowled with the kind of security designed to keep guests from becoming easy prey for everything from the grifter right on up the food chain. Claire Marsland would be as safe here as she would be anywhere, at least for tonight. And there were questions I needed answered.
If I was right about how this had gone down, I hadn’t known that my client from New Coast was anything other than what she pretended to be until Felco contacted me. That seemed pretty certain. And if she was lying to me, it didn’t surprise me that I’d let the little weasel lead me down the garden path a little. Why not get as much information as possible? I told myself all of this in the elevator back down to the lobby. It gave me some consolation that I might not be as big a creep as I seemed to be. It was just possible that I was talking myself into the notion that my hands might not be too dirty to lay on Claire Marsland after all, should the opportunity present itself again.
I stepped out of the elevator, through the lobby and out the front doors into the rain. It was no longer pelting down, but it was still steady. Between the rain and the hour and the general quality of the neighborhood, the
re wasn’t much in the way of traffic on the streets. This suited my purpose well enough. It would make it easier to spot a tail before it was too late, but also might make them feel secure enough to try something.
The chief problem at this stage is that I’d done too well so far. They’d come for me in my office and I’d put a hole in one of them. I hadn’t come out of that exchange smelling like a rose, but I was still alive and still a free agent. They’d been waiting for us at the terminal and I’d lost them. If it was the Locust that sent Black Windbreaker and Brown Sweater, he wouldn’t have been happy at the development, and I found it hard to believe that he’d be much mollified by the fact that Claire’s location wouldn’t be hard to deduce.
I stood still and scanned the street and the doorways across the street. Nothing. I heard a Hov start up and my hands left my coat pockets as if by reflex, to make for a quicker reach for the GAT, but I could see the ride lift slowly a moment later and turn away along the empty avenue. It was black and sleek and too expensive, but it was also leaving.
I turned to the left and started walking. The right would have been more deserted at this hour, which was probably better for my purposes, but I could see a few brightly lit shop signs to the left and that gave me a simple cover story if stopped by a cop. And a cop is like any other working guy, if there’s a reasonable explanation for a suspicious looking man to be walking down the street in the driving rain, he’ll fill in the gaps and save himself the trouble.
If I was any kind of detective at all, I must have contacts in this city. Someone I could ask about Cyrus the Locust that might have an answer. Did he have operators here? Who were they? Or what about this Felco? Could he be looking to pull a double cross? It wouldn’t have taken him much to guess at the Shuttle’s arrival time in spite of my earlier lies. And if it wasn’t the weasel or the big bad wolf, was it ’Frame Internal that was after us? In which case I did... what exactly?
Since my marbles showed no sign of returning in the immediate future, and even if you assumed that I had an impressive army of underworld contacts, I couldn’t set them into motion – it was just me. And if it was just me, I was going to have to stop playing so hard to get. I was going to have to troll for another tail, spot them, and this time grab one of them and beat something out of them. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed like an excellent plan. Sure, the odds were probably terrible, but it almost certainly involved me hitting somebody, and I realized that I was itching to do just that. Maybe that’s the kind of detective I was. No scientific method, no brilliant deductions, just bloody knuckles and a smoking gun. I liked the sound of that. I was mildly disappointed a moment later when I remembered that I’d read that same phrase in Murder, Sweet Murder a few hours ago.