by Gregg Taylor
Claire took a small sip of her coffee. Her hand was trembling a little, but she did not look at me for support. My steak was almost gone. I ate two more potatoes.
“It took longer than perhaps it should of for us to learn of the existence of Claire Marsland, the elder sister and heir. We were barely able to get a trace on you before you contacted Mr. Finn and booked your transport, but there could be no doubt as to where you were heading and why.”
Claire seemed to lose her patience at this point. I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Why are you doing this, Carter? You can’t possibly need the money.”
Cyrus the Locust seemed quite tickled by this. He covered his mouth with a napkin briefly and then smiled like a cat who had swallowed one canary and was about to enjoy two more.
“Money?” he boomed in his delighted baritone. “My dear child, it was never about money. The only way I could profit from E2-476 would be to sell it. I have no intention of sharing it with a living soul.”
“Then why?” Claire seemed desperate to know.
“I am a man of tremendous power,” he began. “This is not a boast, it is purely information. I control enough of the media to be able to spread a thought like wildfire. I own buildings I have never seen, companies for which I have no use. I have teams of bright young, freshly scrubbed executives who merge them, close them, sell them, buy them back again... all to make the numbers dance upon my ledger sheet. I control the destines of those workers. They are my goods, my chattels. They live and toil and die to my greater glory, and I will never know their names.”
I put my fork and knife down quietly. We seemed to be building towards something. Carter kept talking, his voice ringing like thunder through the empty space.
“My enemies are gone and forgotten. The law is my plaything. I mastered the underworld as I did the legitimate economy – to say that I did. I am without equal in this world.” He seemed as pleased with himself as any man I had ever seen. He also seemed as confident as anyone possibly could be which made me wonder when the other shoe would drop.
“Don’t you see?” he said, rising to his feet for the first time. “I am the closest thing this tired world has to a God. The closest thing but one. Only the Omniframe can truly say what is, and what is not. The pronouncements of the Omniframe are more real than reality itself. But it was created to be a tool – to serve us, not to rule us. With the E2-476 protocol in my possession, the Omniframe will bow to me, become my instrument. I will have final mastery over my last remaining challenger, and my ascension will be complete.”
“You’re mad,” Claire hissed.
“No,” the Locust said quietly, leaning both hands upon the table and staring intently at Claire. “You are. Only a lunatic would dare defy me as you have. At approximately 23:00 hours last night, Viktor Marsland’s files were remotely accessed by means of an encrypted interlink code. The source of the uplink was in your hotel room.”
I tried not to look startled. This was news to me. I’d told her not to do it, but she had. While I was out confirming the worst, she was making it a little bit worse.
If anyone noticed the stupefied expression on my face, they didn’t show it. Certainly not Cyrus Carter. “Marsland’s personal effects were released to you. You have accessed his files. I am certain that you now possess every piece of the puzzle. You know where the delivery depot is, and you have the access key that will release the package. And so there is very little reason to leave you at large.”
Yep. I was right. This was it. I craned my neck a little to make sure Brown Sweater wasn’t too close. I still couldn’t see him. He must have gone down the steps to the front door.
“Now,” Carter’s voice boomed.
I whipped back from my view of the front doors to take in Flat-Nose at the back. He hadn’t moved and didn’t seem to be listening. There was no one at the kitchen doors at all. I turned back to the table and realized that Cyrus “the Locust” Carter was looking right at me.
I stood. It was more astonishment than anything else. Claire stiffened in her seat and stared at me for the first time since we had sat down.
I did the only thing that made sense. I pulled the GAT from its holster and pointed it across the table at Carter. Center mass. No need to get fancy.
“What the hell are you doing?” Carter almost whispered. He didn’t sound afraid, just an irritated stage whisper. I straightened my arm and felt my finger on the trigger. One squeeze and it would all be over. Let the chips fall where they may.
Except I didn’t pull the trigger. For an instant... I couldn’t. Claire stood hesitantly.
“Do it,” she pleaded. It seemed to come from miles away.
We stood there, the three of us, in that ridiculous tableau. I have no idea how much time passed, but I don’t suppose it could have been more than a few seconds.
The moment was broken by the sudden crackle of a plasma bolt into the ceiling above the table. Claire screamed. Carter didn’t move. The shot had come from the back door. Flat-Nose was either a terrible shot or he had some other reason for firing high. I didn’t wait to find out what it was, but shifted my aim and pumped a charge into him at twice the distance the manufacturer considered “reliable”. Mine was a little high too, in that it took him square in the face. Carter hit the dirt behind the table.
Another bolt came from a shooter near the back door that I couldn’t see. Before I could respond, another shot came from the kitchen. So much for my math. Locust had at least four boys left.
I fired a few shots in no particular direction, flipped our table on top of Carter where he lay on the floor and grabbled Claire’s arm, racing for the exit. I’d been right about Brown Sweater, he had been by the front door and came up at a run, not knowing who was shooting who or why. For reasons passing understanding he didn’t lower his piece the instant he saw me, and that carelessness on his part got him a plasma charge in the chest.
We leapt over him, raced down the stairs and hit the street at a run. Down the block, there were cops swarming over the Hov we’d left two corpses in. We flagged a cab headed the opposite direction and hit the top lane in twenty seconds. I looked at Claire, panting and wide-eyed still.
“You really should have had the steak and eggs,” I said, meaning every word.
NINETEEN
Forty-five minutes later we were holed up in a dingy Cofficinco bar on the edge of Freeville. Claire was still shaking, and picking at a muffin that I had insisted she buy to try and get her blood sugar up. Heavily fortified with protein, I was merely enjoying a stale, burnt coffee that tasted like it had been strained through a dishcloth.
There was some kind of music playing through a single speaker behind the counter, but the speaker was so badly blown that it was impossible to tell what it was. It seemed to be up-tempo, and that was about the best we could hope for.
“What did he mean... now?” she asked for the fortieth time.
“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t responded to the question the last dozen or so times she’d posed it, and doing so now made her start a little, as if she had forgotten I was there.
“Carter looked right at you and said, ‘Now’,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, because it was true.
“Like he expected something to happen.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” she pressed the point.
“Did something happen?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Then can we assume for the moment that I don’t know?” I was trying to keep it hushed. There were only four other denizens of the café, and it looked like they more or less lived there, but it didn’t pay to attract too much attention to ourselves at this point.
She looked at my hat as if she was trying to see through it, to satisfy herself that she hadn’t imagined what she’d seen last night.
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it,” I demanded.
She paus
ed. “That story you told me last night...” she began before trailing off.
If there was one thing that pissed me off more than telling the truth, it was telling the truth and then being accused of lying. I tried to restrain myself. It wouldn’t do any good to get my back up.
“It’s a story now, is it?” I said as calmly as I could. “It seemed pretty compelling last night. If that’s the kind of standing ovation it gets from a crowd of one, I should consider publishing it.”
“Please,” she said, her eyes welling up a little. “I was excited last night. I was vulnerable.”
“Stop it,” I ordered. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you were vulnerable, but it wasn’t nearly so recently as last night. You got the entire haiku that makes up my life story out of me, and I got a distraction. As distractions go, it was fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it did help to avoid a few subjects.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she protested.
“I watched your face while the Locust was talking. Enough to know that most of what he said was true, or at least close enough to true that the differences didn’t register with you.”
She didn’t have anything to say to that, so I continued.
“You told me your father wrote a letter. A letter that you didn’t find for two days.”
“Yes.”
“And that letter gave you a code to transmit to a blind interlink address, and that was how you were going to find out what our next move was.”
She said nothing.
“I told you not to send the code. But you did. And you failed to mention this fact. It might be said that you went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the subject did not come up.”
“Do you think that’s why I-”
“I didn’t ask then, and that makes it my fault, angel. But I’d said it might be dangerous, and you did it anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Yes and no,” I said. “Carter said someone remotely accessed your father’s files with an encrypted code. Under normal circumstances I guess a blind algorithm could pull that off. But if ’Frame Internal was at all paranoid about your father’s death, getting in to those files couldn’t have been that easy, could it? You’d have needed to know the system pretty well.”
She stiffened. “What are you suggesting?”
I shook my head. “Don’t play innocent, we don’t have time for it. You followed in Daddy’s footsteps, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re an Omniframe spook, just like your father, yes?”
She said nothing. I waited a few seconds and then stood.
“See you, angel,” I said.
“Wait.” There was a throb in her voice that sounded real. Of course, if it didn’t sound real, it wouldn’t be much of a fake, so I put no stock in it either way. I did, however, wait.
“I wanted to tell you, Drake.” I was Drake again. I hadn’t been Drake since I was bashing in the brains of the kid at the hotel. “I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. I know how people feel about Operatives. I knew you wouldn’t help me and I needed someone’s help so badly. Please.”
I sat down. “You’re good. You’re very, very good,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m angry. And I’m a little disappointed. I’d like to have believed in the Claire Marsland that I picked up at the shuttle pad. She was wide-eyed and innocent but tough as nails. I’d like to have believed that a girl like that could go for me, right out of the blue. But I didn’t. Not really. And still I’ve done everything I could for you. And that still goes, if you want it.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. Those eyes of hers were soft again and moist and I didn’t dare look at them in case I got lost again and couldn’t find my way out.
“All right,” I said. “I can help you, kid. I can protect you if you want it, but I need to know the score. You found out where the copy of your father’s program is?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s in the district office of the South Key Shipping Company under the name Golem Protocol.”
“Golem Protocol,” I said, rolling my eyes. “The hubris in this case would choke a horse.”
“Why?” she asked. “What’s a golem?”
“It was a person made from nothing. A man made from clay in mythology. Created by those who were close to God.”
Her brows knit. “How do you know that?”
I shrugged. “No idea. I must read something other than dime novels occasionally.”
She laughed. I saw the laugh lines appear briefly around her eyes. She was no less beautiful just because she was a liar.
“So that’s the where,” I said. “As for the how, Locust implied there was something in your father’s personal effects that must serve as the key... probably something that transmits a code the company needs to release the package. It’s almost certainly something innocuous looking, or it never would have been cleared for release.” She stiffened a little again and squirmed in her chair. I barreled on. “I don’t really have time to be pissed off with you again just now, so I’m just going to assume that it’s the signet ring hanging from your necklace.”
She gasped a little and her hand moved involuntarily. I dared her to deny it with my eyes. “How did you know?” she asked.
“You play with it sometimes, kind of awkwardly, like it’s new. It’s not easy to see. Odds are the Locust didn’t notice it at all with that neckline. But I got a pretty good look at it last night when you weren’t wearing anything else. It’s obviously a man’s ring, and it looks older. It was a guess, but if you’d denied it I’d have left you sitting here on general principles.”
She nodded and smiled a tight, nervous grin.
“So where’s the South Key Shipping Company? I’m assuming that’s our next stop?”
She nodded. “23910 Access Acre, Grid 4.”
I shook my head. “Not much cover in there. All warehouse spaces and narrow streets. Any chance the Locust intercepted the signal?”
Claire looked alarmed. “I can’t think how,” she said.
“Would you have thought he could have traced it in the first place?”
She thought a moment. “No,” she admitted quietly.
“Then we have to assume he knows where we’re going. He might be there already.”
“So what do we do?”
I stopped and looked at her. There was one question I had to ask before we rode down this toboggan hill together. She wouldn’t like it, and the odds were I wouldn’t either, but I had to know.
“There’s one other thing that bothers me about this,” I said.
“Only one?” She was getting playful again. Fortunately the setting made it difficult for her to play the entire hand.
“I know I did a pretty good impression of a guy distracted out of his mind by a good piece of beef, but I’ve still got ears.”
“Yes?” Her brows were knit. She didn’t seem to know where I was going with this. And that was a problem for me.
“Cyrus Carter said that he and his boys had come to an arrangement with your sister Katryn. That she was willing to give up whatever was in your father’s personal effects that might help the Locust get his hands on what I shall now, for purposes of romanticism, refer to as the Golem Protocol.”
“Drake, I promise you, I don’t know,” she insisted, her hand resting on mine. Her fingers were fine and her hand was soft.
“Don’t know what?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What don’t you know, angel?”
“I don’t know why Mister Carter would assume that my father’s effects would have been sent to Katryn. She probably never mentioned me to try and keep me safe.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“That’s not what I was going to ask you,” I said. Her face fell. “In fact, I hadn’t even thought of that. That’s just a ridiculous amateur mistake. We’ll come back to that.”
She said nothing.
“What I was
going to point out was that Carter had made a deal with Katryn. He referred to her in the past tense, rather pointedly I thought. And it doesn’t seem all that likely that, having made his pitch and found that he had the wrong sister, he’d leave little Katryn breathing to spill her tale.”
“Please don’t,” Claire said, shutting her eyes and raising her fingertips off the table.
“See, that’s what I was looking for. But I was looking for it an hour ago. You didn’t even ask Carter what he’d done to her. You didn’t even ask.”
“I would have,” she protested. “I would have, but someone started killing people again.”
This got the attention of the rest of the café. I smiled at her as if she had just said something funny. It was a lousy cover, but it was better than nothing, and I was pretty sure that these inanimate carbon lumps would take any excuse to go back to their own little worlds.
“Listen-,” I said.
Just then the tinny speaker hissed with the crackle of the top of the hour NewsNets breaking through. There was a general murmur of discontent at the terrible sound. It was worse than grating, and far too loud. The skinny kid behind the counter turned on the video feed, which allowed him to switch the audio-only off. An off-tinted display screen flickered to life and the sound from its speaker was infinitely better. I was about to continue speaking when something caught my attention.
“What is it?” asked Claire.
“It’s not Politics,” I said. “Something must have happened.”
“Police Services spokesmen have just concluded a news conference in which they discussed the matter of two seemingly unrelated homicides in Bountiful City yesterday.”
The morning newsreader was a statuesque blond who knew how to work the teleprompter as if each word had just occurred to her as she spoke it. She might have been the one person every soul in Bountiful felt they could trust. She’d probably end up running for office, unless she was computer generated. It was getting tough to tell.