Forests of the Night
Page 18
From the light of the flashers, he could tell the cops were pulling up next to him. He kept low. If the cops had heard the shot, they wouldn't hesitate to blow his head off.
Under the maint panel were the electronic guts of
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the computerized driver. Now he had to think fast. The sky was suddenly visible out the side windows. He was passing over the Cuyahoga River. The three cars were hitting downtown Cleveland, and soon after would be at police headquarters.
The circuit boards were labeled and color-coded. Nohar pulled the one labeled "RF Comm." That should cut the signals from dispatch—he hoped.
The Haviers were pacing the cab, one on each side of the center lane. The second the three cars hit downtown, the cab pulled a hard left—against the light. There was a skidding crunch as it clipped one of the Haviers on the inside of its turn. Nohar was thrown against the right wall. He grunted as the impact reawakened the wound in his hip.
It seemed he'd done two things in addition to cutting contact with the Autocab dispatcher. He had activated a homing program—the cab was no longer heading to police headquarters. It was probably returning to Autocab itself—and the collision with the Havier showed that he had cut the cab's ability to pick up the transponders of other cars.
He heard the long blare of horns and the screeching of brakes-Fuck the cover—the sides of the cab wouldn't stop a bullet anyway. Nohar sat up so he could see what was going on. The cab had run a red light without stopping. The cab wasn't picking up on transmissions from the lights anymore. Or the street signs—it was accelerating. Nohar had blinded the robot cab as well as deafening it. It was following the streets from its memory.
Nohar looked behind him. Only one Havier was following—the one the cab had violently cut off wasn't in sight. The cop had to slow to weave through the chaos the cab had left in the previous intersection.
More horns, another crunch. Nohar was thrown flat on his back. Now his hip sent a crashing wave of pain that made his eyes water. Somehow, he managed to FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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keep hold of the circuit board. He saw the front windshield split in half and fall out onto the road. Nohar staggered up and looked out the back. The cab had plowed through the front end of a slow-moving Volks-wagon Luce. The Luce had spun out and almost hit the pursuing cop.
The cab must have been moving over a hundred klicks an hour now. He was actually losing the cop. Even so, he wondered if pulling the circuit board had been a good idea.
He turned around to see where he was going. Down the road was a row of sawhorses dotted with yellow flashers. The city was digging up another hunk of road—
The cab's brain had no idea the flashers were there. They were topping one-twenty. . . .
Nohar slammed the circuit board back home and dived for one of the rear chairs, trying to get a seat belt around himself. The cab suddenly knew what was ahead of it and how fast it was going. The brakes activated, almost in time.
Whack, one sawhorse hit the front. The flasher exploded into yellow plastic shrapnel. The rest of the sawhorse flipped over the top of the cab. There was an incredible bump, thrusting Nohar into the seat belt. The belt cut into his midsection as the nose of the cab jerked downward. The front-right corner of the cab slammed something in the hole, and the rear of the van swung to the left. The left rear wheel lost pavement and the van tumbled into the hole. It rocked once and stopped on its side.
The seat belt and the brakes had saved his life. The cab had hit the hole only going thirty or thirty-five klicks an hour. Nohar was lying on the left side of the van, which was now the floor. Nohar was still for a moment, letting the fires in his right leg fade to a dull ache.
After the cops were done with him, Autocab would probably want his balls for breakfast. Hell, it was their
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own fault—a remote that gets disabled like that ought to stop.
Nohar unbuckled himself and smelled the dry ozone reek that announced the inductors had cracked open and melted. The cab was dead. Nohar stumbled out the remains of the windshield. Outside was knee-deep mud that smelled of sewer and reclamation algae. Nohar faced the round, three-meter-diameter, concrete mouth of a storm sewer buried in the wall of the hole. He didn't hesitate. He knew providence when he saw it.
He limped into the echoing darkness under the streets.
It seemed like an eternity in the colorless dark, slogging through the algae, listening to the echo of his own breathing, unable to smell anything but the sour odor of the water. The only redeeming feature of his slog through the storm sewers was the fact the air was cool. The water itself was cold, and after a while his feet had numbed to a dull throbbing ache that matched the pulse in his hip.
For once he was worried about Manny's admonitions about infection.
The one big problem he was facing now was that not only had he lost the cops in the sewers, he had also lost himself. From the Hellcats, he knew every inch of the storm sewers under Moreytown. But, of course, he had no idea where the storm sewers were under downtown Cleveland. He had lost his sense of direction a while ago, so he was going upstream—had to be away from the river or Lake Erie. The direction was somewhere between east and south. Eventually he would find an inlet and get his bearings.
The few times he was tempted to go into a smaller branch off of the main trunk he was following, he decided against it. While the trunk was arrow-straight, and an obvious subterranean highway for the cops to follow, he would have plenty of warning before pursuit FORESTS OF THE NIGHT 197
caught up with him. The slight phosphorescence from the algae was enough light for him to see a couple meters in any direction, the pinks would need a flashlight—that would give them away a hundred meters before they ever saw him.
It was also the only route that gave him enough clearance to stand upright. Nohar's time sense was screwed. He'd gone for what seemed like hours without sign of pursuit. He kept glancing at his wrist, but his watch was still with whatever Young's explosion had left of his clothes at University Hospitals. After an interminable period, the world began to lighten. At first Nohar thought it was pink cops with flashlights. However, even though the light let some blue back into his monochrome world, it was much too dim for pink eyes.
He drew the Vind and slowed his approach to the light ahead. It wasn't an inlet. It was a line of holes, large and small, that had been drilled through the concrete wall of the storm sewer. He ducked under a small one that was halfway up the wall, and crept up on a large ragged hole he might fit through. A glance through the hole only showed him a metal-framework scaffold that was draped in opaque plastic from the other side. The tiled floor outside came to Nohar's waist. Under the scaffold he saw a jackham-mer, a small remote forklift, a portable air compressor, and someone's hard hat hung up on one of the struts forming the scaffold. Nohar bolstered the Vind and hauled himself up with his good arm.
He climbed in, crouching under the scaffold. He paused and looked back over his shoulder. He sensed something was wrong, even though he didn't hear or smell anything. He turned around, kneeling on his good knee, and leaned slightly back out the hole. He was waiting the split second for his eyes to readjust to the darkness beyond.
He heard a splash and his hand went for the Vind.
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A hand shot out of the darkness, much too fast, and grabbed a handful of T-shirt and fur, while a shoulder hit him in the right thigh. He wasn't well balanced, and the way his leg was, it buckled immediately.
Things were going too quickly. He barely had time to recognize the arm belonged to a pink. Nohar tumbled through the darkness and splashed into the green algae water. His hand had only gotten halfway to the Vind.
His head went under for a moment . . .
Nohar came up sputtering. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Facing him, and pointing his own Vin-dhya at him, was a pink female. She had short, dark hair—black as the j
umpsuit she wore. She was only 160 centimeters or so, maybe 50 kilos. Despite her size, the way the cords stood out on her wrists as she held the 12 millimeter told Nohar she was prepared to take the massive recoil of the weapon.
"FBI." One hand left the gun, whipped a pair of cuffs at him, and was back bracing the Vind before Nohar could react. "I am placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent ... "
The cuffs fit.
As she mirandized him, he noticed something. Her eyes, pupils dilated all the way, were reflecting light back at him. Her pupils glowed at him. He hadn't noticed at first, since a lot of morey eyes did that.
Pink's eyes did not have that catlike reflection.
She was a frank.
He stared at this small woman who held the Vind like it was a Saturday night special, and he realized he was scared shitless.
CHAPTER 19
Nohar didn't know much about human standards for such things, but he was pretty sure that this frank agent was the "babe" the Fed sent to Bobby. He went with the agent quietly. He had no desire to test her capabilities.
Despite a probable resisting arrest charge, he could claim he'd pulled the circuit because he'd thought they were Zipheads out to kill him. Wouldn't convince the cops, but it was enough to keep the charges down to reckless endangerment, discharging a firearm, and whatever Autocab wanted to lay on him.
She called in on her throat-mike and wasted no time getting him to the surface. Despite the long walk alone with the agent, Nohar smelled nothing from her that made him think she was worried about him escaping. He noticed she put on a pair of chrome sunglasses as soon as they left the underground. They didn't seem to affect her vision at all, even though it was close to midnight. They came out by the shore of the Cuyahoga River, in the Flats close to Zero's. There was still a ghostly smell of carnage to the place.
The pink law was there, in force. A few dozen uniforms had scrambled down to the shore and taken up positions covering the exit from the tunnel. They seemed almost disappointed when Nohar didn't come out, gun blazing.
She led him up the rise next to the river, toward the congregation of parked black-and-whites. The pink cops gave her a wide birth and Nohar detected a slight
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odor of fear from them. He wondered if the uniforms knew the agent wasn't quite human.
She ignored the uniforms and headed right for the one puke-green Havier. Harsk was sitting on the hood, drinking a cup of coffee that smelled synthetic. She
smiled, first time her face showed something other than a hard, expressionless mask. It stopped short of being a sneer.
"Detective Harsk, when I say I have the target in custody—the target's in custody. I was assigned to this for a reason."
Harsk grunted and got to his feet. "Isham, don't dick me around. I don't tell the Fed how to blow its nose. Don't tell me how to wipe my ass."
So her name was Isham. Nohar had thought he detected a slight Israeli accent. "These men would be of better use elsewhere."
Harsk was steaming. Isham's smile was widening. Nohar wouldn't be surprised if she could smell Harsk's irritation herself. Harsk grabbed Nohar by his good arm and addressed Isham in a tone of forced civility. "I appreciate you helping us with your expertise." That was a blatant lie, Nohar could tell.
"But I am still going to do things by the numbers. Especially with moreys. Especially after yesterday."
For a brief moment they were both hanging on to his arm. Harsk had a firm grip. He was strong for a pink. But Isham's hand felt like a steel band. When her hand left—it didn't release his arm so much as vanish—there was an ache where it had been. He suspected she had left a deep bruise there.
Harsk squeezed him into the back of the unmarked Havier, algae and all, and slammed the door shut. Soon Nohar was headed to police headquarters.
The two DBA pinks had fallen into a good-cop, bad-cop routine and didn't seem to realize they were stuck in the middle of a cliche. The bad cop was the fat one. His name was Mclntyre. Good cop was a cadaverous FORESTS OF THE NIGHT 201
black man named Conrad. From every indication, both their first names were "Agent."
Nohar had already gone through the numbers with Harsk, who was, if not civil, at least businesslike and professional about things. These two acted like they were going for first prize at the annual asshole convention.
Mclntyre was into rant number five. "We got you by the short-hairs, you morey fuck. There's over thirty grand in cash deposits to your account. You expect us to believe it ain't morey drug money? You suddenly get that kind of cash, in the middle of the burg with the biggest flush manufacturing center we've found to date—and you show up in a firefight with the biggest distributors. Tell us what's going down, tiger, because we're going to trace those bills no matter how well you laundered them."
So far, Nohar had gotten more information from the pinks than they'd gotten from him. Apparently, somewhere in Cleveland was a major flush industry. Somewhere, the DEA didn't know where, was the lab, or labs, that manufactured the flush for the drug trade throughout the center of the country. The Zips were the major dealers of flush on the street level.
Conrad was doing his variation on being reasonable. "We don't want you. We want the labs. Tell us where they are, or give us some names we can work with. We can intervene with the local judicial system, make it easy for you."
He had already protested his ignorance. So he ignored them and studied the acoustic tiles, silently counting the holes that formed abstract patterns in the white rust-stained fiberglass. He wanted to go home, forget about Zips, Binder, MLI. Worse, he was beginning to worry about Stepnie. Someone torched Thomson. Of the people with access to the finance records, that only left Stephie and Harrison.
It was going to be a long night. At least he knew
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Mclntyre was blowing smoke out his ass about the cash. If the money was dirty, they'd know by now, and he wouldn't be in an interrogation room at police headquarters. He'd be in a cell in the federal building. As it was, all they had was the fact any morey with that much cash had to be guilty of something. When Nohar didn't respond, rant number six was on the horizon. Mclntyre never got to deliver on the steaming invective he must have been considering. Harsk
opened the off-white metal door and let in Is-ham, who was still wearing her mirrorshades. Harsk smelted angry. He pointed at the agents and hooked his thumb out the door. "Mclntyre, Conrad, get out here. I have to talk to you." Mclntyre wasn't impressed. "We aren't done here."
"Out, now!" Harsk was pissed. The DEA pinks obviously didn't expect this from someone they saw as a local functionary. They collected their recording equipment and left.
That left him alone in the room with I sham. She skidded a key ring at him across the formica table. It came to a stop right in front of him. She indicated his handcuffs.
"Take those off."
She didn't wait for him. She turned around to face the large mirror on the wall opposite Nohar. She took off her sunglasses, knocked on it twice, and pointed back toward the door. "I'm waiting."
The comment wasn't addressed to him.
Nohar didn't want to be alone in a room with this woman.
He thought he heard a door open out in the hall. She had just dismissed the cops stationed behind the oneway mirror. By the way her head nodded and moved, he could tell she was watching the cops leave.
"Now we can talk in private." She turned around to face him and smiled. He finally saw her eyes in the light. They looked like a pink's eyes at first, with round FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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iris and visible whites. But there were few, if any, pinks with yellow irises, and none with slitted pupils.
"Aren't you going to remove those?"
He had forgotten about the cuffs. He picked up the keys and fumbled them off. "What's a frank doing working for the FBI?"
She put her sunglasses back on. Now there was no visual c
ue to her nature. But she was still not a pink. For one thing, she didn't have a scent. For another, her breathing was silent. This woman could be behind him and he would never know she was there.
She paused a moment before she spoke. "The executive isn't as picky about humanity as some people would like. If it wasn't for the domestic ban on macro gene engineering, they'd build their own agents.''
Nohar slid the cuffs and the keys back across the table. He tried not to let his nervousness show, but she could probably smell it as well as he could. "So they pick up whatever trickles over the border? *'
"Let's get down to business. I want information."
Nohar sighed. "I told the DEA I knew jack—"
That evil smile widened. If she had been a morey, the display of teeth would make him fear for his life. "Those schmucks never dealt with moreys before. They're convinced all moreaus know each other and are involved in the drug trade."
She reached into a pocket and tossed a grainy green-tinted picture on the table. It showed a shaggy gray canine in desert camouflage. It had been taken with a light enhancer.
Even with the rotten resolution, there was no question it was Hassan.
"I am searching for a canine calling himself Hassan Sabah. Contract assassin, specializes in political killings. Started in the Afghan occupation of North India. Works for every extremist cause you can name. Japanese nationalists, Irish republicans, South African
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white supremacists, Shining Path social humanists in Peru—"
Every group she mentioned was punctuated by a picture dropped on the table: the car bomb that took out the Chinese political director in Yokohama; the hotel fire that killed three UK cabinet ministers in Belfast; the half-dozen Zulu party leaders hacked apart by machetes in Pretoria; the barracks of
lepus-derived infantry taken out by a remote truck filled with explosives in Cajamarca . . .
"Hassan smuggled himself into the country last year with the Honduran boatlift. The Fed didn't know he was in the country until a native of Belfast living in Cleveland recognized this canine." Isham tapped Hassan's picture with one of her slightly-pointed nails. "He's in the country, and he's involved with the Zip-perheads."