by R. L. King
Mr. Johnson nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “We didn’t think you’d be willing to accept our job, so we took certain…steps…to ensure your cooperation.” He picked up his wine glass and sipped. “You’ve been given a—well, let’s call it a poison to make things easy, though it’s actually quite a bit more complex than that. All you need to know about it is that it’s slow acting, especially at the beginning of exposure. As time goes on, it effects will become more debilitating until, eventually, it will kill you.” His voice remained utterly smooth and even, as if he were discussing the weather or commenting on the vintage of the wine.
Winterhawk stared at him. “Why…?” he asked. “Why me? Surely there are any number of others who could—”
“Because we don’t want any of the others,” Mr. Johnson said. That smile was getting old in a hurry. “Don’t you see? We want you.”
He narrowed his eyes—and then he did see. “This isn’t about my skills, is it? Not at all. Whoever’s behind this has some sort of issue with me personally.” His mind spun, trying to put together a list of anyone who might have both a grudge against him and the resources to pull off a scheme like this. He stopped counting when he reached a dozen—at least half of whom had been present at the auction. When you’d run the shadows as long as he had, it was hard not to develop an impressive collection of people who didn’t like you. Most of them didn’t consider his retirement from the shadowrunning business to be a valid reason to put aside their animosities.
“Oh, but it is,” the Johnson replied. “What would be the point of hiring you to do the job if we didn’t think you could manage it? As it happens, you’re rather uniquely suited for it, based on your previous history and what we know of your talents. That is why we wanted you in the first place. So here’s our offer: You do this job, along with any other teammates you can procure. We’ll leave that part up to you. If you complete it satisfactorily and in the proper timeframe, we’ll meet again. You’ll deliver the target of the run, and in exchange we’ll provide you with the antidote to the poison, as well as the remainder of your payment. If you refuse to do the job, or if you take too long to finish it—” He spread his hands and looked apologetic. “—then I’m afraid things won’t go so well for you.” His eyes came up, and the smile was back. “So, what do you say? Do we have a deal?”
Winterhawk was silent. He appeared to still be looking at the Johnson, but his mind was far away, reeling with a cacophony of clashing thoughts: who was this Johnson representing? What kind of poison had they given him? Had they even given him anything at all, or were they merely bluffing? And if they were bluffing about the poison, what had they done to him that had dropped him like he’d been shot?
He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a brief physical inventory: still no leftover effects. “If I refuse now,” he said at last, “Then—what?”
Mr. Johnson shrugged. “Then I thank you for your time, and you get up and go on your way.”
“But the poison—assuming there is any poison—remains in effect.”
“Of course.” The smile was approving this time. “You’ve got about a week, give or take. You must understand that this particular treatment is still highly experimental. So the longer you wait to get started, the less margin for error you’re allowing yourself. Oh,” he added, “one other thing: when you leave here, I’d advise against spending too much time and effort in trying to figure out what’s been done to you. If you talk to the right people, you might get it—I doubt it, but anything’s possible—but we’ll be paying attention. And trust me, even if you do figure it out, it’s not going to be something you’ll be able to deal with on your own in the time you have left. I’m just telling you this because I know how you operate: you have to know things. In this case, curiosity really will get you killed.”
“Is he lying?” he asked Maya.
“Not that I can see,” she said, her mental tone concerned.
He sighed. This was a lot to take in at once, and he still wasn’t sure he wasn’t missing something important. The memory of the flare-up, whatever it had been, was still fresh and frightening in his mind.
“Suppose I decide to go along with this,” he said at last. “What is it, precisely, that you want me to do?” Regardless of his final decision, more information was never a bad thing.
“The details will be on your commlink, back at your hotel room,” the Johnson said. “You’ll find everything you need to know there, along with the first portion of the funds for your payment and for hiring additional talent to assist you. Basically, you’ll be performing an extraction of a willing, high-level target. After you’ve secured the target, he will give you the needed information to complete the second half of the job. I suggest you get started quickly, in case more time is required than anticipated.”
Winterhawk didn’t answer.
Mr. Johnson waited for a full minute, his hands on the table and his expressionless eyes focused on the mage. Finally, he said, “Do we have an agreement, then?”
Winterhawk stood. “I suppose you’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?” he asked, and then turned and left the room.
This time, Mr. Johnson didn’t stop him.
CHAPTER 5
SEATTLE
LAUBENSTEIN PLAZA HOTEL
THURSDAY NIGHT
Winterhawk left the restaurant without conscious awareness of doing so. Outside, he flung himself against the wall and took deep, gasping breaths of the cold, sea-tanged air.
Think, man, he ordered himself. He had to keep his wits together, or he’d be lost before he started. Whether Mr. Johnson was lying to him about the poison or not, it wasn’t something he could take chances with. Not until he had more knowledge, more proof.
A week—maybe less. That wasn’t enough time to split his focus. He was going to have to pick a course of action and commit to it, and soon: he could do the job, he could try to find someone who could deal with the poison, or he could simply walk away from the whole business and call the Johnson’s bluff. The first two alternatives required him to believe that Mr. Johnson’s handlers not only had the desire to kill him, but could also produce or procure a poison such as the one described. The third alternative required him to take a gamble that could either result in his freedom or his death. No middle ground there.
Numbly, he waved down a taxi and gave the driver the address of the Laubenstein Plaza Hotel, then settled back into the seat and continued examining the situation. True, he had a lot of acquaintances and associates who might be able to help him—but the operative word was might. Mr. Johnson had said the poison was experimental—if it was something cooked up deep in the bowels of some exotic corporate skunkworks, it would take a lot of effort and more than a bit of luck to even identify it, let alone figure out how to counteract it. Those kinds of things were doable—anything was doable with the application of enough ingenuity and nuyen—but the timeframes were troubling. That was a lot to ask for in a week, even in the unlikely event he was able to claim the attention of some of his higher-placed associates on such short notice. He wished he’d been able to snap a surreptitious holopic of Mr. Johnson; even though it was obvious the man was a mere pawn in this game, even pawns could be traced back to their masters. Regardless of the course of action Winterhawk ultimately decided to follow, his first order of business would be to find out this Johnson’s affiliations, as well as whether any of the people at the auction were connected with this little scheme. Knowing who was behind it might provide some insight into the resources they’d have available.
By the time the driver dropped him off at his hotel, he hadn’t come up with any other ideas. He took the elevator to his floor and was relieved to discover that the Johnson had not, at least, been lying in one case: his room was as he had left it, with the exception of a small, unmarked, sealed box sitting in the middle of the bed.
He tore it open, not even entertaining the possibility that it might hold something sinister. At this point, he didn’t care. Bu
t no: the box contained only his commlink and his small collection of magical focus items. He checked his cred balances: his usual accounts were unchanged, but now there was a new one, in the amount of 120,000¥. His payment, plus the funds Mr. Johnson had provided for hiring a team.
He hunted around until he found the other file Johnson had included: the details of the run. It was a simple text message:
You will travel to Los Angeles. There, you will perform an extraction on a dwarf named Toby Boyd, who is currently employed as a parabotany researcher by Shiawase. He is prepared and willing, but you must handle the details of the extraction.
The second part of the assignment will require travel to Australia, and the continued assistance of Mr. Boyd. You will be retrieving an item of a magical nature. After you have successfully extracted Mr. Boyd, he will reveal to you the specific nature and location of the object, as well as relevant files and assistance in reaching and procuring it. This object is the target of your assignment. You must return it to us in the appointed time, at which point you will be compensated as we discussed. The safe return of Mr. Boyd is desirable, but not a necessary condition of successful completion.
The file included a holopic of a middle-aged dwarf male with short brown hair, bright green eyes, and a cheeky grin. It also included the address of the Shiawase complex where Boyd was employed.
Winterhawk stared at the commlink, tension creeping into his shoulders. It wasn’t much to go on. Damned little, in fact. If he’d been offered such a job as a legitimate shadowrun, he’d have turned it down instantly. Too many variables to be comfortable with, with the largest being that the entire second part of the run—obtaining whatever the item was that Mr. Johnson wanted—hinged on his team’s ability to find this mysterious Boyd, get him out alive, and keep him alive for the remainder of the run.
Winterhawk hated extractions, even extractions of willing targets. Almost invariably they involved civilians, and civilians were dangerously unpredictable. Shadowrunners, even those you hadn’t worked with before, could usually be counted on to focus on the job. If you hired them to be sneaky and quiet, they were sneaky and quiet. If you hired them to make big booms, they made big booms. What they usually didn’t do was freak out halfway through the run, change their mind about wanting to be extracted when the drek started to hit the fan, panic and run off, or suddenly remember that they’d left important hardcopy files in their offices or family members in their homes that they simply had to retrieve.
The only thing he hated more than extractions was an extraction that required the team to babysit the target rather than simply handing him or her off at the earliest convenience. The longer you held on to someone, the greater the chance something would go wrong.
It was almost as if this Johnson had gone out of his way to tailor a job that hit all the bullet points on Winterhawk’s ‘most disagreeable shadowruns’ list. All it needed was a sewer to slog through.
He sighed, tossing the commlink on the bed and taking a few deep breaths. Assuming the Johnson wasn’t lying about the drug, this got even better; his life depended on finding a magical item he had no idea about: what it was, where it was, or how hard it was going to be to get his hands on. And all of this had to be accomplished in less than a week.
Best to get started, then...
He couldn’t trust his commlink for communication, of course, especially not with anything related to trying to ferret out Mr. Johnson’s true identity and his plan. He’d have to either get another one or have this one checked out by someone who could locate and neutralize any traces or bugs the Johnson’s people might have added. He gave it a brief, cursory examination at both the material and the astral levels, but found nothing out of the ordinary. That didn’t surprise him: if they were bugging it, he didn’t have the expertise to discover it.
The rest of his gear was still in the room as well, and didn’t appear to have been moved or disturbed. He got out of the tuxedo, tossed it in a heap in the corner, and took another quick shower.
Wrapped in a robe, he lay down on the bed and forced himself to relax, reaching out once more to Maya. When she shimmered into place perched on his chest, he told her, “I want you to examine me.”
Maya tilted her head. “Examine you?”
“Astrally. Tell me if you see anything odd. Anything potentially harmful.”
“It’s good that you qualified that. ‘Odd’ is essentially your defining trait.”
“Oh, be quiet and do as you’re told,” he said sourly, but his tone was laced with amusement.
He knew he wasn’t going to get much; a spirit, even one as familiar with him as Maya was, wouldn’t be able to give him the same kind of answer as a trained metahuman practitioner. But he couldn’t examine himself, and he was fresh out of other options at the moment. Even a little information would be more than he had at the moment.
The blackberry cat disappeared. He lay still, sensing her presence even though he could no longer see her. She was gone for perhaps five minutes, then winked back in at the same spot on his chest.
“Well?”
“There is something wrong,” she said. “But I can’t find it. Something about your aura isn’t quite right. Might just be because you’re stressed. Don’t think so, though. I’ve seen your aura when you’re stressed, and this is different.”
“You can’t tell anything more than that?”
“Sorry. Like I said, there’s something there, but it’s doing a good job hiding. Maybe the poison isn’t strong enough to show any signs yet. Plus, I’m not an expert on you fleshy types’ physiology.”
“Fine,” he said. “Go on, then. I’ll call you if I need you.”
Maya purred, rubbed her face against his, and departed. Winterhawk let his breath out and contemplated the room’s ceiling. No point in being disappointed by the lack of a definitive answer: Mr. Johnson’s people had to know if they’d used something simple or easily spotted on him, he would find it fast.
If these were the old days, back when he’d still been a shadowrunner based out of Seattle, this would have been much easier. To start, there would have been any number of local people—people he trusted—that he could have called for a quick examination, both astral and medical. He still had such people: there were several JackPoint members, discreet and professional magical practitioners as well as experts on medicine and exotic poisons, whom he could no doubt seek out for advice and confirmation. But none of them were currently in Seattle, and unfortunately examinations such as this would require him to be physically in the same place as the examiner, or at minimum to send them some quantity of his blood to analyze. With Mr. Johnson’s clock ticking away, he didn’t have time to risk a trip, and even putting aside his reluctance at shipping blood around (desperate times called for desperate measures in this case) it would still take time in transit. If he could find someone willing to help, the best he could do would be to send them what little information the Johnson had told him, and the symptoms he’d felt during the man’s “demonstration.” Not a lot to go on. And before he could even do that, he’d need a secure way to communicate. He had no idea if the Johnson was monitoring his communications, but right now he had to assume his commlink was compromised.
He’d have time to sort all that out as he went, though. For now, he needed to get started on other tasks. If he was going to do this job, he’d need a good team to back him up. He had no illusions about his own abilities: he was a damned good mage, but he’d been out of the biz long enough that he didn’t have the edge he used to for this sort of thing. The shadows changed constantly, with everything old—technologies, skills, people—being pushed aside in favor of the newer, the faster, the stronger. Most of the people he’d run with were gone: either left town before old enemies caught up with them, dropped out of sight, or dead. Shadowrunning was a young person’s game, and it had a nasty habit of eating its talent alive. If you survived, it meant you were either very good or very lucky. Or else you hadn’t gotten on the wrong s
ide of the wrong people yet.
Most of them were gone…but not all of them.
He stood up and dressed quickly. If he was even going to think of actually doing this run, he knew the first person he wanted on his side.
Assuming, of course, that the guy didn’t tell him to go straight to hell.
CHAPTER 6
THE WHARF RAT
SEATTLE
THURSDAY NIGHT
The place was called the Wharf Rat, and it looked exactly like you would expect a place called the Wharf Rat to look. It should have been condemned years ago: its wooden-timbered structure was more rot than wood these days, and the state of what it laughably called its ‘kitchen’ was such that nobody in the know—or at least nobody without a cybernetically enhanced digestive system—would ever risk ordering anything that required cooking.
Its cuisine had never been the Wharf Rat’s draw, though. Neither was the bar, though it did a brisk business in cheap beer, assorted varieties of cut-rate synthahol, and an occasional bottle of the real thing when somebody made a big score and decided to splurge. Those just gave the patrons something to do with their hands until the real action started downstairs.
Nobody quite knew how the Wharf Rat stayed in business (and more surprisingly, independent) for as long as it had. Frank, the crusty old troll who owned the place, had been a fixture in this corner of Seattle’s docklands for more than fifteen years, and during that time he’d never had to deal with more than a few halfhearted attempts—by local law enforcement, upstart gangers, and the occasional newly-minted mob up-and-comer—to muscle in on his territory. No one ever identified any definitive reason why: rumors ran the gamut from speculation that he was the secret son of a powerful politician, that he was a retired shadowrunner who arranged the murder of anyone who messed with him, or—to the most farfetched—that he had long ago done a big favor for a dragon, and the wyrm had arranged it so Frank didn’t have to worry about any attempts to take over his place.